Have you ever written a message to someone on Facebook or LinkedIn and heard nothing back? It happens a lot and yet it’s still aggravating, like someone not returning a phone call, refusing to make eye contact, or ignoring an offer to shake hands …
I start imagining all kinds of things, like the person that didn’t answer my message is terminally ill, hates my guts, has been kidnapped by aliens, not to mention unprofessional.
So here’s the irony of it all.
I realized I was doing the same thing! I was blithely committing the same faux pas of not responding. When I took the trouble to double-check I found messages placed on social media that I had left unanswered from as long ago as the year before. How rude of me! What a loss of social capital, one that easily could have been avoided.
So here we are using social media to build relationships and it’s working against us as much as it’s working for us, inadvertently abandoning our friends to empty space. Now we can all feel crummy.
Here are three ideas to help preserve our precious social capital (which in the so very personal design business can mean success or failure).
- Develop a social media checklist with “check the spam folder and messages” daily at the very top.
- Review and possibly limit the number of social media platforms we’re using, because they all have message features whether we bother to check them or not.
Be heroes. Let’s try to respond with a question or comment when one of our friends in the design community posts and that post looks as though it will go unnoticed. Let’s make sure that the share they’ve offered doesn’t suffer like some kind of social media wallflower. That way we’ll all increase our social capital to the extent that we can afford to lose a little when mistakes inevitably happen.
Want more? Join our next trade only social media workshop Jan 13. Click link for info and registration info: Info and Registration
