12 | February | 2009 | Direct Marketing Observations

If you don’t, someone will do it for you.

I have so much to learn about the human condition as it pertains to social media, it’s not even funny. I learn something every day. Today I learned that I really don’t know as much as think I do. Case in point. I smugly tweeted the following:

So I comment on a person’s blog who claims 2 b all about the conversation & they choose to delete it. Guess it’s not about the conversation…

I was thinking that I was right and I was thinking that it might be cute to tweet that if it’s so much about the conversation, then why are they deleting comments? So what did I get back in response? Ken Beaulieu tweets the following:

No. There are times when you have to push back to protect the integrity of your business.

Pretty succinct and to the point, wouldn’t you say? The bottom line is this. My comments, no matter how cute or clever I thought they might have been, brought zero value to the conversation. ZERO.

That person, who I highly respect, who probably has zero respect for me at this point, pushed back to protect the integrity of her blog and a very good blog post. She had every right to not include my snarky, baseless comment.

As I said, I have so much to learn about the human condition as it pertains to social media. In social media, our human condition is there for everyone to see. Regardless of who you are, there is a certain amount of respect that we need to show everyone. I learned that there is no place for ego here.

If you don’t know who Toby Bloomberg is, then you should take the time to find out. She writes one of the top marketing/social media blogs in this space called Diva Marketing Blog, and it should be on your blog roll and in your feed reader as we speak. She is a warm, caring and brilliant strategic marketer.

Toby recently spoke at the AMA Marketing Strategy Conference in Orlando in which she gave a presentation titled First Generation of the Next Generation of Marketing.

One of the many great things about Toby is that she knows how to utilize the power of her networks. Case in point, she created the following slide for her presentation, from a conversation that she and I had on Twitter.