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<< Happy 2015 Social Media Day! >>

Tami Lancut Leibovitz

Happy Social Media day, and what’s a better way to celebrate it than a Social Media greeting! Today, June 30th, marks the 6th anniversary of the annual Social Media day, celebrated by media outlets and social media fans around the world. While every day of our lives is a now a social media day, it’s a chance to pay respect to the social revolution that changed our lives forever. Some of the biggest events of last year were held in Egypt, Italy and the U.S. and many events, picnics and meet-up are planned for this year’s celebration all over the world, for example, in the panama city, Panama, the festival called #SMDayPA attracts a few thousand locals joining to discuss current social media issues and ideas .If you decide to celebrate the event on-line, use the hashtag #SMday to join the event on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any of your favorite social online platforms.

The ability to share information, connect globally, organize on the web and speak our voices, changed our society and the way we think and operate. The internet and social networks act as a parallel environment to our reality and there are codes of behavior for communications just like interpersonal connections has. Before we go deeper into those rules, let’s celebrate our beloved social media platforms and look back into a few cases this year, when Social Media showed its strength in human connections and proved to all of us how awesome it can be:

Our first דtory, a sad and tragic one, is coming from the same part of the world that I am from, the country of Israel. Last summer, during operation “Protective Edge”, Staff Sgt. Nissim Sean Carmeli was killed in Gaza. Carmeli was a “lone solider”, an Army terminology that means he came to Israel especially to join the IDF and didn’t have a support family system in the country. He was new to the country didn’t have many friends or family in Israel, so on the day of his funeral, worried that not enough people will show up, fans of the same sports team Carmeli was a fan of - “Makkabi Haifa”, Haifa’s Soccer team, posted the word on Facebook and shared that following note publically, with the approval of his family: “Come and pay final respects to a hero who died so that we can live. It’s the least we can do for him and for our people.” More than 20,000 people, strangers to Carmeli, arrived at the funereal to show their respect. Without the powerful force of social media, the call to gather and show up could have never spread so fast to so many people. This gathering brought a feeling of unity and strength in a time of despair in Israel and brought comfort to many.

In another case, this time in the U.S, we had the Birthday Party that Facebook helped happen! A story that started as a sad Facebook post, resulted in a happy ending thanks to sharing on social media! The mother of a disabled young girl from Minnesota, found out on the day of her child’s party, that none of the invited guests and their kids are planning to show up.  She made a public call on Facebook for guests to come and make Mackenzie’s day into a happy day instead of a disaster. Not only people showed up, celebrities and local businesses came to support and cheer the young kid and her family. Check out the full story on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dphtxv7VunU

In the recent tragedy, only a couple of weeks ago, in the Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, nine members of church were shot to death. It was a shocking and troubling event for the families and the community, and not much hope was left for inspiration. After the terrible incident, Stephen Colbert, a native to South-Carolina and a Famous TV host, took himself to help and promote the “unity chain,” on Twitter, a local initiative, calling for locals to gather and join together in hope in order to pay final respect to the church members that lost their lives. Colbert’s social media power, brought over 15,000 folks to the event that brought a friction of hope to the local broken community. Colbert himself actually made it to the event:

Also, excited locals were playing “paparazzi” and twitting it live:

So now we know how great social media can be, but just as it can be great, it can be harmful. I wrote about some of the risks in an article dedicated to Netiquette (Net Etiquette Code) but today is a positive celebration, so let’s talk about what we should do on the web instead of the don’t’s and about positive ways to channel our message and strategy on social media platforms:

  1. Balance your content! No one wants to be obviously sold to and social media is not the place for it. Think of your social media platforms as relationship creators and build a language and a rapport between you and your current and future clients. Promotion and “selling” is welcome if it’s presented with accurate elegance and timing.
  2. Be personable! Don’t give in and give up to bots, automatic options or timed apps. It’s ok to use timed tweets or posts once in a while, when away in vacation or busy work schedules, but as far as a general response to tweets and posts, make it personal and take time to explore the common interests you have with your followers.
  3. Keep it cool! Thanking and greeting new followers and users that share your content is great, but it needs to be in moderation so you won’t appear as an automatic response. If you tweet or post back at the new followers, a personal note that is relevant to the content you share, you’ll enjoy a stronger connection rather than a meaningless thank you that won’t lead to another response or interaction.
  4. Keep learning and evolving! Social media options and settings change all the time. Keep up with the changes, read about social media case studies and get updated with the social media news. You will learn from success stories and from the failures!
  5. Stay positive! Never get into a fight on social media, no matter how hard the client or heckler will try to push you. Losing face as a brand or a business is even worse than a personal meltdown. Don’t let the “trolls” mess up your social media balance and flow.

To sum our social media celebrations for this year, I would love to say I am truly grateful for the great personalities and opportunities social media networks opened for me around the world. Following etiquette guidelines on social media is important, but the most important is to be kind, polite and fascinating! On that digital note, would love for you to share my article on your social media sites!

If you have any social media and “Netiquette” questions or any other etiquette question, please feel free to visit the question section on my site and leave a question - http://bit.ly/AskTami or write me at tami@tll.co.il.

For more about web etiquette and so much more, please visit my website! For more information about my new book, visit Amazon and check me out: The IBL Code: International Business Language.!