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In order to be a success in any online community whether it is for professional or personal reasons you must earn credibility. According to Wordnet Credibility is…
"the quality of being believable or trustworthy"
So, to show you how this can be done I'm going to show you how NOT to earn credibility.
6 Ways to Destroy your Credibility when participating in Social Media
- Be Fake. Be whatever you feel you need to be in a community…. Lie if you have to.
- If you make a mistake…. ignore it. Hope no one will know.
- If you are asked something and don't know the answer… come up with one anyway. Never say that you don't know. It's better to at least give some kind of answer.
- Bad mouth your competition. This way members of the community will know that you have the better product.
- Blog about what you think people want to read. Writing about what you are passionate about might not make you the most money…. It's about the money and not about the people after all.
- Never link out to the other sites even if it would help your readers. You don't want your readers going anywhere else… social media is ALL about you, you, you!!
These are sure fire ways to destroy your credibility when participating in Social Media. And, once you destroy your credibility there is no way to come back up easily.
Shana Albert is a Social Media Specialist. She writes on all things Social Media and Web 2.0 on her blog – Social Desire. Subscribe to hear more of his ramblings.
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A quick way to do it, related to point 1, is leave a couple of tons of vacuously generic or nakedly self-serving comments scattered over the blogosphere. Like "Yeah! Good." or "Great article. By the way, *self-promoting link*!".
It's amazing how quickly word gets around.
Oh, and never revisit the same comment thread twice. If someone answers your comment with a question of their own or tries to start a discussion…..to hell with 'em. I mean, regular readers are a pain anyway – they remember your "principles", so you can't flipflop on anything important to get more hits. eg. "McCain's an ass", then "Obama is sanctimonious, give me the war veteran" the following day.