A year ago I wrote about the importance of watching what you say on your blog, message boards, Twitter, Facebook, and any other social networking site. One of the biggest reasons is that you never know how long those messages stay online, where they eventually end up, or who might end up seeing them. Last week, that point was underlined by the announcement that the Library of Congress will be acquiring ALL of the tweets sent on Twitter since it’s inception in 2006. If you’re on Twitter, that means that everything you put out there is fair game.
Now it’s really unlikely that they or anyone else would care about much of the insignificant tweets that shows up on Twitter, like what someone had for dinner, or the antics of their dog or cat…but the point is that once you put that information out there you don’t have a lot of control of over where it goes or how it’s used.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be paranoid to the point of opt-ing out of social networking or the Internet altogether. A lot of artists react the opposite way and avoid sharing anything significant because they’re scared of the lack of control. This just means that you have to be thoughtful about what you put out there, especially if you’re using social networking and blogging to promote your business. Before you shoot out that blog post or that tweet think about:
- Is this something that I might regret a few years later?
- Is this something that will end up putting myself or my business in a bad light?
- Is this something that might be construed as hurtful or insulting?
- Is this something that you would be comfortable with your customers seeing?
- Is this something that I’m comfortable with spreading online without my control or knowledge?
- Am I separating my business communications from my personal communications and is there a danger of the personal negatively affecting the business side?
Remember that interacting on the Internet isn’t all that different than interacting in real life. The biggest difference is that on the Internet, your actions can be seen my a lot more people and are documented for a lot longer.
So what do you think? How do you handle your online communication in the age of Twitter. Leave a comment and let us know!
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Those are excellent guidelines to consider when posting anything online. While I’m not crazy about the way the social networks seem to be treating users lately, it does just go to reinforce that if we don’t want it public then it shouldn’t be posted online.