Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for that title. 🙂
My friend & resident blogger at LinkedIn, Mario Sundar, found this follow-up post to a comment I left on one of the “live-blog” write-ups on my Graphing Social Patterns East keynote yesterday. In the write-up, Craig (the author) had left a slightly snarky response to an answer I had given during Q&A. I posted a quick comment to help clarify the issue, and to express my honest thanks for the live-blog synopsis. As you can tell from the title, Craig liked the response:
Worth noting here is how Adam–in a way befitting the professionally oriented nature of his enterprise–responded so perfectly to my intemperate post. He started with a compliment and shifted into a clarification that reframed [and corrected] what I’d written. He ended with another compliment.
This is a near-perfect display of best practices when responding to a negative post: Remain calm and respectful, do nothing to escalate a the exchange, clarify the point, keep it short. He comes off looking good, representing himself and his company very well.
I’m really glad Craig wrote this post, because it’s a topic I’m fairly passionate about. (Plus, he gave me the title for this blog post.) I honestly believe that the way employees behave and communicate with the outside world is part of the brand and part of the connection that a company has with it’s customers, followers, and even detractors. More importantly, when you help participate and encourage friendly discussion, it helps you remember that we’re all just people – people with opinions, sure, but real human beings.
It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget sometimes when you get caught up in theoretical and emotional arguments in email, groups, and blogs.
The truth of the matter is, I was really grateful to all the people who captured content from the conference. I’ll be posting a more official summary of the material tomorrow on the LinkedIn official blog. For tonight, here are some snippets that might entertain my family & friends who read this one.
First, here are the three live-blogs of the keynote I gave, called “LinkedIn: The Business Social Network“:
The last one is where I left the original comment that Craig was responding to.
Here are some Flickr images, courtesy of James Duncan Davidson:
This is from the keynote in the morning.
These three were from a really fun panel called “The NEED for FEEDS” that we did in the afternoon.
Anyway, while it’s good to be home, I had a lot of fun participating in GSP East 2008, and I learned a lot from the conversations I had with different people there. We’re in such early stages of people figuring out the social internet, it’s wonderful to be a part of it all.
And Craig, just in case you read this, you should know that our Director of Communications at LinkedIn thinks I should add your article (and title) to my LinkedIn profile permanently. 🙂  Hopefully, we’ll get to chat live in the future sometime.
Psychohistory 