I have been hosting the Social Media Manners chat for over one and a half years, and have enjoyed every single moment of building a community of people who value positive interactions on social media.
About Last Night…
Last night our guest for our live chat was Klout. As most of us know, Klout has become the industry standard for online influence measurement. Most of us value our ability to use social media effectively and we tend to take such measurements seriously.
Typically in the chats that I host, I value that the hour is not about my guest, or me but about the community. The hour is about you, the individuals who allowed our community to become “US”. For most chats, I will come up with a list of questions for my guest, and encourage your questions throughout the chat as well. This allows you to engage and be heard.
Given the recent changes Klout has made, I knew I needed a plan to avoid confusion and to produce an hour where all concerns and questions could be addressed. I asked for questions in advance and heard from many of you and was able to compile a list of questions that covered your concerns.
My goal was to avoid having our guest being inundated with hundreds of replicated questions. I announced our new format for the night many times prior to and during the chat.
Most of you followed the plan and I appreciate it. In doing so you showed great respect to our guest and our community. Respect in all relationships is key and a very core component to online success.
About Last Night…
Often, when boundaries are set and new rules are instituted, there are idivdiduals who will resist change, dismiss the boundaries and take it personally if they are asked to do modify their behavior. As in all cases, this is about the person resisting change, not the actual changes being made. When one is immature, reactions are often misplaced and amplified. Just as the child who is given a cookie each day and then suddenly given carrots… what happens? Think about it. One word. Tantrum.
Tantrum. During our chat last night, we had a member of our community do just that. I was shocked and dismayed, as this member of our community is one whom I have engaged with and connected others to.
What occurred was this; in attempts to gently send a reminder to stay on course with our format during our chat, I simply sent this tweet….
”Shhhhhh, hold your questions until the end. xo”
In return, this individual created a blog post. In reviewing timelines, one can easily see the intent was clear. The objective was to write the post and deliver it to our stream before our chat was over. The post was titled….
“I was Thrown out of a Twitter Chat”
In reading my message again, I am not clear as to how my words could be interpreted as “Throwing someone out of a twitter chat”. I was simply sending a reminder to hold questions until the end of our chat. In this case specifically, I knew that the questions being posed to our guest were on my list and I wanted to allow our guest to continue with her amazing content without disruption.
Let me be clear. I at no time asked anyone to leave our chat and in no way felt it wrong to ask a member of our community to respect the format for our planned event which I prepared and moderated.
To leave our chat to write a post to defame my brand and our community was a breech of the very core values of which I speak to. Such actions showed an ultimate act of disrespect, and I view such as an example of extreme immaturity and very poor Social Media Manners.
To act out of anger with intent to humiliate and diminish my professional standard, and then laugh and take joy in the fact that many of us were offended was disrespectful beyond measure. To outwardly lie in a public blog post and say one was “thrown out of a chat” coupled with further untrue accusations was legally and ethically wrong.
About Last Night…
To the members of our Social Media Manners community, I thank you for your support and your defense of the words posted in the blog discussed and disrespectful tweets. I appreciate that many of you are choosing not to respond to this person’s mentions or read the post as in doing so, we will continue to give this bully type behavior the intended results of increased web traffic. In fact, in giving mention to such a person on twitter, regardless of the reason, we learned that our high Klout scores will in fact, give this person a score increase.
As I have stated many times ~ to bully another person on or off line is unacceptable. However, we are only able to control our REactions to another’s actions. I do believe in accountability however and feel strongly that one should not be allowed to simply post non-truths as a result of hurt feelings, grudges and tantrums. Often accountability comes in many forms. Legal, Social and yes…even Karma. Time will tell as to what form accountability takes in this situation.
About Last Night…
Beyond the dissidence of last night, I learned much. I learned I was valued. I learned I was respected. I learned what really matters is that in coming together each week as a community; we have formed a family and partnership making millions of impression in regard to Social Media Manners each week.
Let’s continue to focus on the amazing things we share and learn together. Together, we have built an amazing community and surrounded ourselves with leaders in our industry and relationships we respect.
Let’s release the bully. As in the playground of our childhood, when the bully is ignored…he will simply stomp off and target another group.
Goodbye Bully…. You don’t live here anymore.
