Social Media – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly – What Do You Know?

December 28, 2008 by Carl Tambeau
Filed under: Relationship Marketing, Social media

With regards to Social Media for your online business, we can show you the beauty and the beast scenario of this type of online marketing. As an example let’s take a look at Facebook as a media for Socializing on the internet.

Recently I started looking at social media as “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” – you never know what connections are going to help, hurt or destroy your online business. Facebook is an online media that brings millions of users together being able to connect with each other at whatever level they choose.

Some users prefer to socialize only, with this community – keeping up to date on what their family and friends are doing is usually the goal with this group of people.

There is another group of users who prefer to use Facebook and other related media’s, as a way to connect to others who share similar interests. These entrepreneurs are looking to build a group of connections to share their business with, the goal is usually to build an online connection, hoping to increase sales.

As an example Facebook is an amazing community where you will meet all walks of life but what we never know are the results we are going to get. As with any action, business or personal, there are risks involved. These risks are not solely related to offline activity but online activity as well.

Whoever you let into your online circle of connections can improve your reputation through professional interaction as well they can hinder or harm your online reputation through deliberate or accidental sabotage.

How is this possible?

Recently I had some friends from school added to my facebook profile. At first it was exciting to hear from some old friends and we reminisced about old times, they started posting vulgar messages to my wall, which was stuff that teenagers would do.

It was obvious my maturity level was much higher than theirs, I found out both of my school buddies had been divorced twice, which was not a big shock. Soon after receiving messages to my wall, some of my business connections started to send me private messages, expressing their frustration of seeing such vulgar language on my wall and they were saying goodbye as they wanted nothing to do with me.

This was huge for me as I was not like my old buddies, maybe not perfect, but certainly my interests are in helping you with social media and other areas of online marketing.

The challenge was, my buddies in my facebook group were making me look very bad and childish, so it was time to say goodbye and block them, which is exactly what I did. Once these guys were deleted all the vulgar language stopped and people noticed as I received a few messages on that as well. That was the better messages.

You need to be very careful on how you manage your facebook account and for that matter how you manage your social media contacts. When you first add contacts to your community, you have no idea what these people are all about so once you find out you need to make a quick decision whether to keep or purge from your list.

How they represent themselves in your group will bring positive influence to your reputation or if they are not conducting themselves properly it can hinder or ruin your reputation. Be prepared to act either way – mange your online business – Social media is important but you need to pay close attention.