Social Media Examiner’s Networking Club Rules

Updated: 2/23/2011

We promise to give you a world-class experience in our Networking Clubs. As we thought about what that meant for our community, we came up with some guidelines for us, and some guidelines for the community.

WE PROMISE:

• To provide a great place to network and make connections.
• To answer questions related to the club or facilitate the discussion around those questions. If we can’t answer them ourselves, we will direct you to a resource that can help.
• To facilitate discussions around the best ways to use social media tools to help your business.
• To give you a fun and engaging experience while you network.
• To provide a safe environment where everyone is welcome to interact without spam, harassment, inflammatory or obscene remarks, prejudice, or other nonsense. We reserve the right to remove comments or tags as we see fit.

WHAT NOT TO POST:

• Off topic: Posts should be related to the threads within the Clubs. Other posts will be removed at our discretion.
• Ads, affiliate links and promotional links: Please, no spamming. You are welcome to assist others in the community and we request that you use your good judgment when posting links to products, services, articles and blog posts.
• Simple links to other sites: Please don’t use the Clubs like you would Facebook.  This means avoid new posts to articles. We prefer discussion over links to blog posts and articles. Of course you can link to a relevant post when replying to someone else.
• Repetitive posts: No posting the same content (in word or purpose) in multiple groups.
• Explicit/Hate Speech: Don’t be defamatory, insulting, discriminatory, abusive, demeaning, or indecent. It won’t be tolerated.
• Adult/explicit content: Enough said…
• User tag abuse: Definitely @ tag others when it makes sense. Do not blast-tag everyone or tag for no reason.

EXAMPLES:

• If someone is asking a question and your service is the answer, it is always appropriate to reply publicly. For example, “I need someone who can help me build out my Facebook page…” Your reply, “Our company specializes in this…”
• Alternatively, if someone asks a question that might not be looking for a service, but you make a connection, then send a private message that person and say something like this; “I saw that you were looking for tips on how to improve your Facebook engagement.  I happen to help small businesses as a consultant, in case you’re looking for outside help…”
• Both of these situations share one thing in common: contextual relevance.

Let us know if there is a problem. We will try and address your needs, but we may ask you to take the conversation offline. If you do not respond to our attempts to mediate the situation and harass or continuously spam our community, we may have to block your access to the Clubs. You can reach our community manager, Andrea Vahl, at [email protected].

Please note: We reserve the right to ban any member from the clubs for inappropriate behavior and without warning.

Welcome to the Networking Clubs. We are deeply grateful for your presence here. Return to clubs now.