Respect Culture Within the Social Web

In the offline world, respecting cultures is just common sense. Different ethnicities, different geographic locations, heritages, traditions, etc. are all around us. People come from different backgrounds; in my opinion, cultural diversity is what makes the human race a beautiful thing.

Similarly, the online world is full of different cultures; however most assume online cultures consist of the same factors that define culture offline. Sure social web users have diverse backgrounds that include religion, traditions, regional understandings, etc., but beyond these distinguishing elements lie cultures of each social network.

What does that mean?

People interact and consume information within a specific social network differently then they would others. For example, if you are on Twitter and link your Facebook status to your Tweets, do you often get people within Facebook telling you to stop spamming their feed with all your status updates? They might not even be involved with the same social networks as you and not understand that Twitter is about microblogging short posts.

In the case of Twitter and Facebook, these are two very different worlds. Facebook’s main landing page is a social stream of your network. Where folks can see photos, links, comments, events, etc from friends, family, and colleagues. This tends to be a more intimate interaction as posts are not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

The point being, if one evolved within a given social network, they understand many social norms within that space that might not carry over to another space. If you tweet a lot, and carry that over to Facebook status updates, some might consider that spam. Or at the very least, see it as a social faux pas with that social space.

Social networks develop social norms within their space; be mindful and respect the given culture within that space.

Many large corporations hire anthropologists to understand the business etiquette of various nations in order to minimize the cultural gap. Here at Activating Word of Mouth, consider us your cultural consultant to the online world.

There are many spaces that have different cultures. Make sure you don’t take that fact for granted.