While making a yummy afternoon snack, I dropped some of my food on the floor. “Five-second rule”, right? Everybody’s heard of it. If you pick up the piece of food within five seconds, it doesn’t matter that it was on the ground. It couldn’t have gotten THAT dirty, right? Imagine how much food went to waste before this rule!
Do your social media activities have a five-second rule?
Have you ever in the heat of the moment hastily written a blog post ranting about a client (names excluded to protect the innocent) and posted it only to regret it altogether the next day? You can always just delete it, right? Sure, you may have deleted it from your blog/website, but if I subscribe to your blog via RSS feed, your blog post is sitting in my Google Reader. The damage can’t be completely undone.
How about Twitter? Sure, it’s a more laid-back community, conversations can happen pretty quickly. What if you’re tweeting on your business’ handle towards the end of the work day and instead of typing “ask”, you type “a**”? You don’t realize it until the next day because you “power-down” at 5pm (who does that anymore? Raise of hands?). You quickly delete the tweet so it’s removed from your Twitter profile, but the damage has already been done in the form of retweets (your followers sharing your tweet with their followers).
Have you ever made a social media blunder only to realize that you couldn’t completely “take it back”? I feel that the online world is forgiving when it comes to accidents in the case of my Twitter example above; but how about the blog example? Thoughts?
