Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #25: Cour­tesy is a Must

A lot of peo­ple find it eas­ier to start in­ter­net busi­nesses. This is be­cause with such a busi­ness, face-to-face com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not nec­es­sary: what you re­ally need are strong, per­sua­sive words. How­ever, if you think that you can act any way you want just be­cause you are work­ing on­line, you are gravely mistaken!

Es­tab­lish­ing Good On­line Reputation

No mat­ter which Web 2.0 sites you are us­ing, be it Twit­ter, Face­book, fo­rums, or blogs, there is some­thing you have to re­mem­ber: you’re al­ways rep­re­sent­ing your business.

That said, you have to make sure that you will talk and act in a nice man­ner around cus­tomers as well as col­leagues. En­gag­ing in flame war on a fo­rum or per­son­ally at­tack­ing a blog reader will not make a good im­pres­sion. It is bet­ter to hold back and stay calm. Oth­er­wise, you will get your­self a good num­ber of en­e­mies, and your rep­u­ta­tion will surely be tarnished.

In ad­di­tion to cre­at­ing en­e­mies, flam­ing will also make your busi­ness look un­pro­fes­sional. Your ex­ist­ing cus­tomers and prospects will go about ques­tion­ing your in­tegrity. They will go about, won­der­ing, „Is this the kind of mer­chant I want to as­so­ciate with?” Surely, the an­swer to that ques­tion will be a big „NO!”

There­fore, when you start an in­ter­net busi­ness, you must al­ways be cau­tious. Keep these 2 points in mind as well:

1. Never start crit­i­ciz­ing and bash­ing oth­ers pub­licly. If you have noth­ing good to say, then don’t say any­thing at all.

2. Be very con­scious when oth­ers start a nasty dis­cus­sion with you. Don’t re­act emo­tion­ally; in­stead, think about the best pos­si­ble re­sponse. If you stay col­lected and think things thor­oughly, you will find that some­times, it is best to not re­act at all. Some­times, it is enough for you to keep calm, lay out facts, or just ex­press­ing that you don’t see any value  in fights.