Social Media Oath: “Above All, Show Respect”
The day after I publish a piece on using comments to promote a product (see Big media talks about your competitor?) a story on mobilecrunch is forwarded to me where a commenter does exactly what I described, and it stops me in my tracks.
The article is about two websites, flickr.com and radar.net. Both are picture sharing services with a difference. The point of the story is that Radar released an iPhone application that also supports flickr and the relationship between these seeming competitors is symbiotic because they are as different in intent as Twitter is to Facebook.
Along comes Philip Kaplan. Phil posts the comment “I prefer Mobog for sharing cameraphone pics. It appears to have a bigger and more engaged community than Radar, so more people will see and comment on.”
Then he posts a link to mobog.com followed by the disclaimer “I founded Mobog and this comment is spam (tho everything in it is true) 
”
Thirty minutes later, he comments on his own post: “Now I feel bad for leaving this comment. It’s kin of mean. Sigh. I would delete it if I could.”
Philip Kaplan followed my advice to the letter. He shared a comment on a big media story about competitors products, expressing how his preferred product differs. He didn’t hide behind an alias. He disclosed his vested interest. He even preempted criticism with a quick apology. Yet the way he went about it still stinks. And he’ll probably get away with it.
Philip Kaplan is not only a shill for his start-up, he’s also the founder of AdBrite, F–kedCompany, and several other web-oriented businesses, he’s been featured in Forbes and Rolling Stone. He’s the sort of dot.com entrepreneur that many people wish for themselves to become. Kaplan also has a reputation for openly using black-hat techniques for raising his own rankings in search engines. Kaplan knew what he was doing was wrong, and every word–including the apology–was engineered to get more notice for his 2008 start-up.
So where did I go wrong in my previous advice? I don’t think I did, and I still stand by it. But it was incomplete. I didn’t account for people like Philip Kaplan who will openly game the system because he knows that it will irk people, but not land him in jail. Phil doesn’t care about brand reputation. He knows that most internet brands are disposable. A brand has no value until it gains mass, so if mobog.com never sprouts, Kaplan will just toss it away and move onto his next big idea.
For those readers who are brand custodians, a real brand that has value, I would like to suggest a social media version of the Hippocratic Oath. “Above all, show respect”. Respect the author, respect the conversation, and respect the audience. If you do that, it will be difficult to make enemies in the social media community. You can still share brand insights and points of differentiation. Just do it with respect.
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