Social media and other new media channels are an important part of business and the workplace. Younger generations are “digital natives” and take them for granted, but many others – including many leaders, managers and business owners – struggle to master them. Understand the key differences between old and new media, and learn how to use them effectively for communication and collaboration.

You can watch the recording here:

After the webinar, I asked participants “What was the most useful thing you learned today?” Here are some of their answers:

“Your line “When was the last time you did something for the first time” struck a chord. Also, concept of reverse mentoring – very interesting.”

“Reminder about moving away from text”

“4 principles of new media”

“That I’m probably more familiar with new media than I imagined.”

“Loved the 3 action steps & the question…when was the last time you learnt something completely new.? We all need to enrich ourselves in order to grow & develop regardless of our stage in life.”

“That new media is visual, not just print”

“The concept of conversation rather than commercial.”

“The reverse mentoring – I talk to my daughter about things, but now I can see our discussions in new light.”

“New media principles and key actions”

“Get a reverse mentor”

“Quantity not quality”

“I learned there is so much I didn’t know that I didn’t know! So hard to keep abreast of all the latest technology – thanks for sharing so generously Gihan”

“How quickly the technology gets old!!!!!”

“A talented young lady has appeared as a consultant to our wilderness and nature tours, really enthusiastic about our products and would be a great reverse mentor”

“”The distinction between new and old media.”

The Future Proof Webinar Series

The Future Proof webinar series will keep you in touch with our future – what’s ahead, what it means for us, and how to stay ahead of the game.

In each webinar, I’ll cover an important topic about the future – for example, the shift of power to Asia, the changing workplace, healthcare technology, the shift to customer-centric business, big data, and more. This is not just theory; I’ll also give you practical examples and ideas for you to future-proof your organisation, teams, and career.

More ways to engage with me:

• Book me as a speaker for your next conference
• Engage me to run an in-house workshop
• Subscribe to the podcast for more great content like this program
• Subscribe to my Thinking Ahead newsletter
• Read and subscribe to my blog

LinkedIn is one of the oldest social networks. It’s often not even mentioned when people talk about social media, but it is a social media platform. LinkedIn has added so many features recently that it’s easy to get confused about how it works and what to do with it. But if you focus on the things it does best, you can get a lot of value from it.

In this short slide show, I share ten things you can do with LinkedIn to establish credibility and enhance your authority.

1. Update your profile

Ensure your LinkedIn profile is professional, current and accurate. Use a professional head-and-shoulders photograph. For the “Summary”, write a succinct description of your role and what problems you solve in your organisation. Include as much contact information as you’re willing to share.

2. Change your public URL

By default, your page on LinkedIn has a weird URL, but you can customise it to make it more readable (for example, mine is linkedin.com/in/gihanperera). This is not essential, but it’s free and easy (provided the URL you want is available), so you might as well do it.

3. Add a Professional Portfolio

Enhance your “Summary”, “Experience” and “Education” sections with documents, pictures, videos, and slide shows. This gives depth to your profile and helps newcomers understand more about you. If you don’t have original material to share, start with company material (with permission).

4. Connect with people you know, like and trust

Most of your LinkedIn connections are not your prospects or customers, but peers and colleagues who are connected to you for mutual gain. Think professional association, not marketplace. They are more likely to refer you than to buy from you.

Connect only with people you know (both for incoming and outgoing invitations). There are some exceptions to this rule, but this is a good start.

5. Search for interesting people

Use LinkedIn’s Search feature to find people you might want to connect with. For example, if you’re attending a conference or other event, look up the speakers, panellists and other participants on LinkedIn. You might find some that are worth connecting with before the event.

6. Ask for introductions

One of LinkedIn’s best early features was the ability to ask people you know for introductions to people they know. This feature is used less now, because we can connect with people in other ways. However, it’s still useful because you get a warm introduction from somebody you both know.

When asking for an introduction, explain why you want to connect, so the “middle man” knows how best to pass on the request.

7. Write Recommendations

Write testimonials for people in your network by writing a “Recommendation” for them. Apart from helping to boost that person’s reputation, LinkedIn also invites that person to return the favour, so this is a good way for getting recommendations for yourself as well!

8. Share your articles

All of the ideas above will help build your LinkedIn network. That’s all leading up to the most important thing you can do: Share your own ideas.

LinkedIn has its own article publishing platform called Pulse. Use this to publish original articles, and all your immediate LinkedIn connections will be notified. These articles also appear on your profile, so they boost your authority further.

9. Participate in groups

The more you participate, the more value you get. On LinkedIn, the best place to participate is in groups. Search for groups you like, join them, and participate. Start by “lurking” (just watching silently to see how the group operates), and then join in and contribute. Start by answering other people’s questions. You don’t have to be a world expert; just share your experience.

10. Do more!

If you really find that LinkedIn is working well for you, there are a lot of advanced tools to help you get more value from it. Set a goal to try one new thing regularly, and you’ll quickly start getting more value from LinkedIn.

Charli’s Crafty Kitchen, run by eight-year-old Charli and her five-year-old sister Ashlee, has one of the biggest food and cooking YouTube channel in the world. They couldn’t have done that 10 years ago because TV used to control visual access to the masses. But it doesn’t anymore.

You might have also heard that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to win the social media battle unless you have deep pockets. In fact, a client recently asked me something along those lines:

“Social media has become an incredibly overcrowded space in the last 12 months because many businesses in our industry have heeded the advice and jumped on board. There are so many competitors now on social media both growing organically and through paid advertising. Many of these companies have a lot more to invest financially and can afford to pay an agency to manage their social media for them. Smaller companies, like ours, who do not have this capacity are now watered down and social media may well become one of those tools only applicable to deliver results for the larger companies.”

This is a common concern, but in fact that doesn’t have to be the case. Social media allows you to level the playing field, and compete against larger companies – but only if you do it right.

Here is the world’s simplest social media strategy.

Broadly, you can do three things:

I’ll explain …

1. Comment: Start by participating, contributing only with Likes, Favorites, and comments.
2. Curate: Set aside an hour or two each week to selectively share other people’s material with your network.
3. Create: Set aside blocks of time to create your own high-quality material and share it on social media.

By doing these three things over and over again, you’ll gradually build your online network, and be seen as a credible source within your community.

Start now!

Make no mistake – getting successful on social media does take time. But it’s not beyond the reach of small organisations. And just because you don’t have millions of dollars to throw at it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. In fact, you can often do much better because you’re not relying on one-off “campaigns”. Instead, you’re steadily building an ongoing relationship – and that is worth much more than an advertising campaign.

Most of the buzz about social media is about Facebook and Twitter, and very little is said about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is often not even mentioned when people talk about social media, but it is a social media platform (and one of the oldest).

That’s both bad and good news. It’s bad because it means fewer people know how powerful it is. But that’s good for you because if you take advantage of it, you can stand out. It’s especially good for professional service firms – like accounting practices – where so much of the business is based on the expertise of the people in it.

LinkedIn started life as a recruitment network, to help employers and job seekers find each other. It still works that way, but for your accounting practice, it’s better to use it as a place for demonstrating your professional authority.

Keep in mind that most of your LinkedIn connections are not your prospects. They are peers and colleagues who are connected to you for mutual gain. Think professional association, not marketplace.

That doesn’t mean you won’t get any business from LinkedIn. On the contrary, LinkedIn can be one of your best sources of businesses. But think of it as getting business through your connections, not from them. In other words, they are more likely to refer you than to buy from you. But that referral to a key person in their network might be worth much more to you than selling directly to the referrer.

You already know the power of referrals in your practice. Here are seven things you can do to get more of them from LinkedIn.

1. Update your profile

Ensure your LinkedIn profile is professional, current and accurate. Some of this is straightforward, but take note of these important bits:

• Name: Include your name and only your name. Some people add keywords in their name to appear more prominently on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn doesn’t allow this, and can block your account for it.
• Photo: Use a good professional photo, not a silly selfie or a cartoon (unless that’s really part of your brand).
• Summary: This is where you write your “blurb”. If you don’t know what to write, use my Four E’s formula: Experience (number of clients, years in business, number of offices, etc.), Expertise (tax, corporations, small business, etc.), Education (qualifications), and Endorsements (awards, testimonials, etc.).
• Contact Info: Fill in as much as possible, because you want to make it easy for people to get in touch.

2. Add a Professional Portfolio

You can enhance the “Summary”, “Experience” and “Education” sections of your profile with documents, pictures, videos, and slide shows. LinkedIn calls this your Professional Portfolio. Use it to enhance your reputation and give you more credibility than just your text description.

Ideally, the material you add here will be relevant to your clients – for example, a slide show about tax changes, a video about the current property market, or a PDF report about how to improve business cash flow. However, if you haven’t created this material yet, include material that promotes yourself – for example, a photograph of you speaking at a networking event.

3. Connect with people you know

Start by connecting only with people you know. This applies both to incoming invitations and outgoing invitations. If you don’t know them, don’t connect with them.

There are some exceptions to this rule, where you choose to connect with other people in your network:

• People who seem like a good match: For example, this might be somebody in your industry or your niche market.
• People you meet on LinkedIn: For example, people who comment on your posts, participate in your groups, or engage with you in other ways.
• People who are introduced by somebody else: We’ll talk about introductions soon.

When you connect with somebody, LinkedIn’s default message is “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”. If you get the opportunity to change this, do so and explain exactly why you’re connecting with them (For example, how you know them). Unfortunately, LinkedIn sometimes doesn’t allow you to customise this message.

4. Search for interesting people

Use LinkedIn’s Search feature (at the top of the page) to find people you might want to connect with. The Advanced Search allows you to be specific about your search criteria – e.g. people with “retail” in their title in Sydney.

As another example, if you’re attending a conference or other event, look up the speakers, panellists and other participants on LinkedIn. You might find some that are worth connecting with before the event.

Once you find people of interest, you can start connecting to them. You do this by asking for an introduction – which we’ll cover next.

5. Ask for introductions

One of LinkedIn’s best features is the ability to ask somebody you know to introduce you to somebody else in their network (just as you would do elsewhere in your life). Because that person in the middle is trusted by you and the other person, the initial connection is far warmer than just a cold contact.

When asking for an introduction, explain why you want to connect, so the “middle man” knows whether to pass on the request.

6. Write testimonials

You can write testimonials for people in your network by writing a “Recommendation” for them. Apart from helping to boost that person’s reputation, LinkedIn also invites that person to return the favour, so this is a good way for getting recommendations for yourself as well!

LinkedIn also has a feature called “Endorsements”, where you can endorse people for certain skills and expertise. But it just takes a click to do this, so it’s not highly regarded. Ignore Endorsements, but use Recommendations.

7. Participate in groups

As with any community, the more you participate the more value you get. On LinkedIn, the best place to participate is in groups (look under the Interests tab on the menu).

Search for groups you like, join them, and participate. You can start by just “lurking” (just watching silently to see how the group operates), and then join in and contribute. The easiest way to start is just by answering other people’s questions. You don’t have to be a world expert; just share your experience.

Most LinkedIn members don’t like people who promote themselves, so don’t promote yourself! Just give solid answers that genuinely help people, and they will look up your profile anyway.

8. Share interesting articles on your news feed

You already read a lot as part of your ongoing professional development and interest. If this material is public and online, post links to it on your news feed. Go broader than your own areas of expertise, and think of things that might interest your clients – for example, articles about marketing, sales, goal setting, productivity, innovation, and social media.

Which of these ideas could YOU use?

All of these ideas are easy to do, and don’t take much time. There’s a lot more you could do with LinkedIn, but just doing a few of these eight ideas will put you ahead of most LinkedIn users. Most importantly, get your momentum going with just one of these ideas today!

LinkedIn has added so many features recently that it’s easy to get confused about how it works and what to do with it. But if you focus on the things it does best, you can get a lot of value from it.

LinkedIn is one of the oldest social networks. It’s often not even mentioned when people talk about social media, but it is a social media platform.

It started life to help you get a new job. You would promote yourself as an employee to future employers and recruiters. You could also broaden your network by asking for referrals through people you know. It’s still a powerful job/career network, but that’s not important to us as business leaders and business owners. But some of the other things about LinkedIn’s past are still relevant:

1. You can show yourself in your best professional light.
2. It’s a great network for professional networking
3. You can say nice things about others in your network
4. You can ask people you know to introduce you to others in their network
5. It’s a network of peers and colleagues, not necessarily customers and suppliers

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1. Profile

Use LinkedIn to post your “CV” or “resume”, so people who do want to know more about you can find something. This is not a traditional CV you would write when seeking a job. Rather, it’s a promotional profile piece that positions you as an expert and authority. It’s more marketing-oriented than a traditional CV, but isn’t full of hype.

2. Networking

Think about going to a business networking function. The people you hate there are those that are too self-promoting and just interested in taking without giving. The people you love are those who take an interest in you and genuinely look for ways to help you – even without an immediate benefit to them. They do win in the long term, though, because people like them and genuinely want to help them in turn.

LinkedIn is the same. Don’t promote yourself too much. Instead, use it to connect with people, answer questions, solve problems, and in general be helpful rather than pushy. Position yourself as a trusted advisor, not a pushy salesperson.

3. Testimonials

If somebody does a good job for you, you naturally want to tell other people – especially friends and other people in your network. In the physical world, you might write a testimonial (which they use in their promotional material), or bring it up in conversation with your friend. But what if you don’t know your friend is looking for that service? And what if the supplier hasn’t promoted your testimonial well?

LinkedIn solves both these problems by letting you put testimonials (LinkedIn calls them “Recommendations”) right there on the supplier’s profile. It also encourages the supplier to reciprocate by writing a testimonial for you as well.

4. Introductions

The world works on recommendations, referrals and introductions. If I introduce you to somebody I know, that person already trusts you (to some extent). In fact, wouldn’t it be great if the only people we worked with were people who had been referred or introduced by somebody else?

LinkedIn works the same way in the online world. Use it to reach out to people you would like to reach, not just by contacting them out of the blue, but through somebody who knows you both. Because that person in the middle is trusted by you and the other person, the initial connection is far warmer than just a cold contact.

5. Peers and colleagues

Finally, keep in mind that most of your LinkedIn connections are not your prospects. They are peers and colleagues who are connected to you for mutual gain. Think professional association, not marketplace.

That doesn’t mean you won’t get any business from LinkedIn. On the contrary, LinkedIn can be one of your best sources of businesses. But think of it as getting business through your connections, not from them. In other words, they are more likely to refer you than to buy from you. But that referral – to a key person in their network – might be worth much more to you than selling directly to the referrer.

The biggest battle most people face with social media is finding the time to do it. Obviously, you need to spend some time being active on it in order to build your profile and presence. But there are some simple tools you can use to leverage your efforts and build your online reputation.

Broadly, there are four things you should be doing to build your online presence:

1. Comment with value: Make relevant, useful comments on other people’s material.
2. Curate with context: Share other people’s material with your network.
3. Collate with perspective: Point out patterns in seemingly disparate areas.
4. Create unique material: Create and publish your own material.

I hope you’re doing some combination of these four things as part of building your social media presence. If not, you should be!

OK, so how do you get more leverage from your efforts? Let’s look at some options …

Commenting: Make your comments go further

If you answer a question in a LinkedIn group, do you stop there or copy your answer into a blog post? It only takes a few minutes to do, but it spreads your expertise further.

When you finish reading a book, do you write a review on Amazon.com? You should. And do you then copy that review into your blog? You should do that as well.

Curating: Make it more efficient

Curating content means you read (or watch or listen to) a whole bunch of stuff, discard most of it, and share the gems with your network.

First, choose when and where you want to consume the content by using a tool like Pocket to bookmark interesting stuff to the Cloud, so you can read it later on your phone or tablet. That way, you won’t be distracted from your other work.

Then, when you want to share something, use a tool like Buffer to distribute it to your social media networks. Buffer lets you space out your postings over time, so you don’t flood your followers with a whole bunch of updates at the same time.

For even better results, use a tool like Crowdbooster to figure out the best times to post.

Collating: Gather and store ideas quickly

When collating, you’re looking for patterns across different areas, so you won’t necessarily be able to post something immediately. So you need a way to efficiently gather, store and then find material later.

Use a tool like Evernote to store your ideas, and make sure you connect it to your Web browser, e-mail, phone and tablet, so you can easily store things you find in your Evernote account.

Also choose the best sources for new ideas and material. For example, Slideshare is a great source for getting an overview of a topic, because it’s less detailed than reading a book or watching a video.

Creating: Make each piece work harder!

Make no mistake: Creating highly-relevant, engaging content is not easy. So when you do create something – whether it’s a blog post, newsletter article, video, slide show, or webinar – work really hard to make it work really hard for you.

The key platform for this is your blog. Post everything there, and use a tool like Twitterfeed to distribute it to your social media networks.

How can you use these ideas?

First, are you commenting, curating, collating and creating? If not, get started – even if you start slowly at first.

Then look at ways to get more value from it. I hope you’ve got some ideas – now put them into practice!

Paradoxically, one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority is to share insights and wisdom from others. Your audience will appreciate you taking the time to selectively share what’s relevant to them. The Internet makes it easier than ever before, and if you know where to look, you’ll have an endless supply of high-quality material you can use – easily and legally.

Here are five tips for doing this efficiently and effectively.

1. Be a lifelong learner.

You can’t share what you can’t see! So you have to first adopt the mindset of a lifelong learner, and constantly expose yourself to new material in your area of expertise. This is not just for sharing with others, of course, but also because the world is changing so fast that your current knowledge soon becomes obsolete. So you need to keep learning.

2. Find the best sources.

Be selective about where you get your knowledge. Look for reliable high-quality sources in your area of expertise. They might be certain YouTube channels, specific bloggers, selected podcasts, a few e-mail newsletters, Google Alerts for important keywords, and some other very specific sources of information.

Ideally, you want sources you can subscribe to, so the material is delivered to you automatically. Otherwise it will become inconvenient to keep getting new material.

3. Process it efficiently.

Even after being selective, you’ll still get too much material to handle. So figure out the best way to process it efficiently.

For example, I like listening to audio more than watching video, for two reasons:

1. I can listen to it while doing other things, such as exercising and driving.
2. My podcast player lets me play it at double speed, so I get through it twice as fast!

Your mileage may vary, so choose what’s right for you. For example, one of my friends prefers watching the TED talks (rather than listening to the audio-only version) because he travels a lot, so can watch them on long flights.

4. Discard ruthlessly.

Remember that you’re helping your followers by sharing only what is most relevant to them. So don’t share everything that comes your way – or even most of it. Be ruthless in deciding what not to share, keeping in mind that what you do choose to share reflects on you and your reputation.

For example, I probably share about 1 in every 20 or 30 things. Of the others, I discard at least 80% of them because they aren’t relevant to me. Of the few that are left, they are only relevant to me (but not to my followers), so I don’t share them either.

5. Share it quickly.

When you find something worth sharing, share it! Don’t just file it away for future use in a workshop, keynote presentation, book chapter, or blog post. You can do all of those things as well, but first send it out to all your social networks. There are software tools to help you manage this process, so you can distribute it to multiple platforms, and space out the delivery over time. But the main principle is to get it out of your world and into theirs.

How can YOU use this idea?

I hope this inspires you to find and share more. Your followers really do appreciate somebody else doing their reading for them, and it also enhances your image and reputation in their eyes.

When I talk to people about getting involved with social media – such as Twitter, blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the like – they often say they don’t know how to behave in these environments. This is a genuine and valid concern. After all, your mum might have told you which cutlery goes with which course, but you probably didn’t have anybody telling you the etiquette of communicating in the on-line world.

Based on my 23 years of using the Internet, I’ll give you the seven most important rules for you to follow.

1. Give honest and sincere praise.

If you see something you like on-line, tell the person who created it – preferably publicly. For example:

• If you enjoyed reading a blog post, add a comment.
• If you like a podcast, post a review in iTunes.
• If you enjoyed reading a book, write a review in Amazon.com.
• If you like a YouTube video, add a comment.
• For all of the above, tweet about it as well.
• Look at your LinkedIn connections, and write a recommendation for somebody in your network.

Make sure the praise is specific, and, if possible, add value to the conversation. For example, if you’re adding a comment to a blog, it’s OK to just write “Great blog post!”; but it’s much, much better if you can also add your perspective to it.

Don’t make this a sneaky marketing tactic. For example, don’t look for sneaky ways to insert your Web site address in there, unless it’s relevant. People see through this easily, it taints the praise, and it damages your reputation.

2. Don’t criticise in public.

I recently saw a well-respected blogger rant about an e-mail he received. However, it was an internal e-mail from an organisation to its members. Rather than spending five minutes checking into the background and context of the e-mail, this guy ranted about it on his blog. It was totally out of context, and totally inappropriate. Unfortunately, because he had taken such a strong stance, when people started pointing out his error, he was too far gone to back down completely, and dug in his heels further. Although he did back down a bit, I’m sure he was glad when the torrent of comments faded away!

This is the flip side of the praise coin, of course. Assume everything you write on-line is recorded, backed up, indexed in Google, and can be used in evidence against you. Even if you meant it to be private, once it leaves your computer, you’ve got no control of it!

So just be on the safe side, and bite your tongue.

3. Respect other people’s opinions and backgrounds.

When Australian cricketing legend Don Bradman passed away in 2001, I remember one news report that said more Indians than Australians mourned his loss. It was just one more reminder that we live in a global village.

As an Australian, I’m in a tiny, tiny minority of Internet users (less than 1%). North Americans are in a minority (15%). So are Europeans (25%), and even Asians (42%).

The motto of the Internet is “Think global, act global”. Allow for differences in culture, time zones, language, Internet access, speed of access and timeliness of information.

Gone are the days when we “Westerners” would be expected to “tolerate” other cultures. In the on-line world, if anything, it’s the other way around.

4. Become genuinely interested in the people in your network.

On a smaller scale, create real connections with the people in your on-line network: Your Twitter followers, your Facebook fans, your LinkedIn connections, your e-mail newsletter subscribers and your blog readers.

Of course, I’m not asking you to connect with everybody in your network. But at the very least, when somebody makes an effort to communicate with you, give them the courtesy of a reply.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s about quantity – the number of Twitter followers you have, for example. It’s not. It’s a cliche, but it really is about quality instead.

Don’t think “connect”; think “re-connect”.

5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.

If you follow the previous rule and genuinely take an interest in other people, you’ll find myriad ways to help them on-line.

It might be as simple as forwarding an article to them, or directing them to a YouTube video, re-tweeting something relevant, or forwarding this blog post !

A decade or so ago, I heard business consultants recommend the idea of faxing magazine articles to clients, as a way of keeping in touch. Now you don’t even have to send a fax! You can forward an e-mail, DM a tweet, send a Web link directly from your browser, take a photo on your phone and e-mail it, etc. You get the point!

By the way, I’m not saying you shouldn’t send a fax (or a postcard, handwritten thank-you card, or book). I’m just saying there are easier ways as well.

6. Be a good listener.

I used to regularly tell people how important it was to survey your market before launching a new product or service, because your market will tell you exactly what problems they want solved.

I still believe in the importance of understanding your market. But I don’t think surveys alone are good enough any more. Your market will expect you to know what they want. How? Because you’ve been listening on-line. You’ve been participating in discussions, reading and commenting on blog posts, joining relevant Facebook groups, monitoring LinkedIn questions, and so on.

Surveys are still useful, but they’re no longer the most important piece of the puzzle. Be an active listener before you send out that survey.

7. Show them how to get what they want.

It’s nice to praise, respect, connect, re-connect and listen. And even if you do nothing else but this, you’ll build a strong, positive reputation on-line.

But if you really want to put the icing on the cake, help them get what they want.

This doesn’t mean you have to give away your intellectual property! There are many other things you could do that don’t de-value the material you charge for. For example:

• Introduce two people in your network to each other.
• Scan your Sent Mail folder for responses you’ve sent to somebody who’s asked a question, and consider publishing them on your blog (on the premise that if one person found the advice useful, others might also value it).
• If you see somebody’s tweet asking for help, re-tweet it to your network as well.

How can you use these rules in your on-line world?

I’ve given you some specific examples here, but they are only examples. Some of them won’t apply to you, and conversely you’ll find other ways to achieve the same effects. The important thing, of course, is to understand the principles.

Did you like these rules?

If you did, I’ve got a confession to make …

I called these the new rules of social media communication. Ummm … That’s not strictly true. I swiped all seven of these rules from Dale Carnegie’s classic 1936 book “How To Win Friends and Influence People”.

That’s right – the basic rules of social media haven’t changed in 75 years!

It’s not about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, HootSuite, Blogger, TweetDeck, iPad, WordPress or Foursquare. It’s first about people connecting with people, and treating each other with courtesy and respect.