'Netiquette' for Sales Professionals: Six Rules for Social Media Communication

By Landy Chase, MBA, CSP

 As the selling profession transitions from traditional to digital methods of initiating relationships, it is important to remember that there are significant differences between traditional and digital methods of communicating. Below are six “rules of the road” for building online relationships with business contacts:

Be Yourself: Write to others as you talk to others. Show your personality. Be real. People who don’t know you at first will warm up to you quickly by getting to know you in this way. You will never meet all of them in person, but they will be much more likely to follow you – and recommend you to others, a key to your success in building your footprint – if they find you to be a likeable, genuine person through the way that you write.

You are talking to people, not computers: The world of online communication lends itself to being impersonal, if we so choose. After all, there is an element of anonymity to online communication that can de-humanize the way we interact with others. We can forget at times that we are talking to other people, not other computers. This, combined with the ability to hide one’s identity, causes some people to abandon traditional parameters of good behavior, particularly when participating in polls or forums. You see examples all the time in comments posted on a variety of websites; there are a lot of people who say things to one another on the web that they would never say to them in person. People, who use the cloak of anonymity to say ugly things online, simply because they can remain anonymous, are cowards. You do not want to be one of these people.

 Rudeness in the online environment is just as inappropriate as it is in the real world. Remember that you are interacting with other people who have feelings similar to your own. It gets back to talking to people online as if you were talking to them in person – if you wouldn’t say it to them in person, don’t say it to them in your correspondence.

Who You Are is What You Type: The most important aspect of online communication – something that you must be aware of at all times- is the singular power of the written word. Because you are a sales professional, in your ‘natural’ environment as a sales person – a face-to-face interaction with another human being – there are a myriad of factors collectively creating the overall impression that a prospect or client has of you, and how you are therefore perceived. These include how you shake hands, how you sit, your appearance, your voice, eye contact, hand gestures, and many other, more subtle nuances. When you are communicating online, all of those interpersonal aspects of you that make you who you are have been stripped away. You need to take this into consideration, because it is a fundamentally different environment than you are used to.  In this universe, the words that you choose online have singular, absolute power over how people perceive you. Your online persona consists entirely of what you write. Take heed, be careful, and be conservative.

Be Accurate: One of the things that you will learn quickly about the online community, if you haven’t discovered it already, is that there are people online who have way too much free time on their hands. We know this to be true, because there is a legion of users that spend copious amounts of time serving in the unpaid capacity of researching content posted by others, solely for the purpose of finding items that are inconsistent, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. When they find a discrepancy, in behavior reminiscent of Pavlov’s dog, they get their ‘reward’ by publicly outing the offending party that posted the item. Why do they delight in doing this? Because they have an overwhelming need to be appreciated and/or noticed, we suppose.

Irrespective of their motivations, it pays to be diligent in validating the accuracy of any claims that you make, or data that you share, about a subject, particularly one within your field of expertise. You can get by with an occasional mistake, but repeated instances will undermine your credibility to those who follow you in the online community. If you cannot validate a piece of information, do not present it as fact; present it as an opinion, or at the very least, as information that you obtained from another source. This will give you some protection in the event that the item turns out to be bogus. Rest assured, if it is, someone will delight in holding you accountable.

 Spelling and Grammar: Your grammatical skills, or lack thereof, is another area of communicating online that affects both your brand and your credibility as a Value Generator. Here again, if your sentence structure and/or spelling are not consistently accurate, the same people who scour your content for inaccuracies will also pick apart your grammatical mistakes publicly and make these, and not the value of your content, the focus of the online community’s attention. Always use a spell-check tool to review your writing before posting it. Read your content through a couple of times, even aloud if necessary, to ensure clarity of message. It is well worth the time to do some editing of what you write, if the extra effort results in improving the value of the information being presented.

Avoid Racy Humor: As you build your social media followers, never take liberties with their taste in humor when distributing ‘funnies’. The problem with forwarding jokes of any kind, and particularly racy ones, is that you never know who will find something you send out as stupid, or worse, offensive. You cannot win here. Some recipients might find a dirty joke that you forward to be hilarious, but they are still left with a new perception of you that you probably don’t want them to have. Remember that you are building a personal brand, and everything that you say and do either contributes to or detracts from that brand. There is too much risk involved to your professional reputation to forward questionable content to your online followers.

[Excerpted from his book, The Social Media Sales Revolution.]

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