Social Media Spin

Blogs, forums, YouTube videos, book­mark sites all seem to thrive on bad news and neg­a­tive hype. Bad news gets traf­fic. Neg­a­tive hype sells. But even though neg­a­tive hype is like smack to many social net­work users, there’s a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple who, in an effort to keep things bal­anced, are unpop­u­larly try­ing to bring “nice” back to social networking.

One such exam­ple was just a cou­ple of days ago. A rel­a­tively small group of Twit­ter users got fed up with the end­less talk about Twitter’s Fail Whale (the default page graphic that dis­plays when Twit­ter is over­ca­pac­ity or down for main­te­nance). This small group of pos­i­tive thinkers decided instead to cel­e­brate Twitter’s suc­cess and openly pimped the Twit­ter Pre­vail Whale.

The pos­i­tive atti­tude wasn’t a resound­ing suc­cess — there were those who con­tin­ued to bring up Twitter’s down­time — but it was a shift in think­ing for many of us to actu­ally appre­ci­ate the suc­cess of Twit­ter, and by exten­sion our­selves in social networks.

Another exam­ple comes this morn­ing from Joel Post­man, Prin­ci­pal of Social­ized. He tells about his own expe­ri­ence of neg­a­tive and con­tro­ver­sial con­ver­sa­tions in social net­works. And among other things, he has per­son­ally cho­sen to stop crit­i­ciz­ing oth­ers on blogs sim­ply to make a point. He calls this con­trar­ian phi­los­o­phy a Social Media Love Man­i­festo.

Is the social net­work com­mu­nity ready to play nice? Are we ready to quit jump­ing on the FAIL band­wagon when­ever some­one starts to get attacked in social net­works? Per­son­ally, I’m with Joel. Some­times, the Tweets com­ing through Twit­ter are so inflam­ma­tory and rep­u­ta­tion dam­ag­ing that I sim­ply have to turn it off for a while until the flames die down. I’m not a pussy and can take care of myself, but I also have a strong sense, like I think most of us do, of what is fair. So as of today, I’m advo­cat­ing Joel’s Social Media Love Man­i­festo. For those of you that haven’t read it yet, here it is:

“The peo­ple we “meet” in our online inter­ac­tions are real peo­ple. They prob­a­bly own a com­puter or two, write a blog or par­tic­i­pate in a social net­work, and through the social media fil­ter we see only glimpse of them, but that does not mean that they are not real, or that we are in any way excused from treat­ing them like any other per­son we would meet.

I have there­fore resolved that when writ­ing on my blog, or when using any other form of social media, when call­ing into ques­tion the con­duct of a spe­cific, iden­ti­fi­able per­son, I will:

• Base my com­ments on the facts, and make rea­son­able efforts to gather all of the rel­e­vant facts before weigh­ing in on a con­tro­ver­sial discussion.
• Weigh care­fully the value of any com­ments I choose to make against the poten­tial for harm.

And I will not:

• Make assump­tions about people’s motivations.
• Gen­er­ate con­tro­versy for its own sake.
• Join oth­ers by super­fi­cially “pil­ing on” when some­one is under attack

I will always strive to:

• Treat peo­ple online with the respect and kind­ness I would extend to a friend or colleague.
• Take time reg­u­larly to leave a sup­port­ive com­ment on a blog or acknowl­edge some­one pos­i­tively in a pub­lic forum.”

I’m going to give this a try. Are you game for play­ing nice in social media net­works? Tell me about your views, pos­i­tive or negative.