Become a Home Based Travel Agent

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Revisited
By Tom Ogg

I just logged onto the Travel Professional Community and saw that I had an email. I opened the email to find a faintly veiled solicitation that was sent to all of the sender's friends. While I don't really know the member well, I have met him and through his participation in the community, had come to respect his knowledge of Wordpress. What was the net result of the solicitation? Well, the member went down a few notches in my opinion of him (as I suspect others who received the veiled solicitation did) and it reminded me of how just one online mistake can have great impact. So, I thought I would re-share an article that I wrote on the subject to remind everyone to nurture their online persona.

Here is the article.

I think everyone remembers “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood”. Our son Andy used to love to watch the program. Every weekday for thirty years Mr. Rogers would put on his sweater and favorite shoes to settle into a conversation with his “neighbors.” Of course, all of Mr. Roger’s neighbors were nice people and they talked about all kinds of nice things. The show was very pleasant and taught young children the value of being a good “neighbor”.

Fast forward to today. Many of our “neighborhoods” have changed. We belong to various online neighborhoods like Facebook, Twitter and other online social media. We belong to online professional networks like HBTACommunity.com and others. And, while the “neighborhood” environment has changed, being a good “neighbor” is still important. The only thing that is missing is good old Mr. Rogers to show us how to be a good neighbor online.

After years of participating in online communities like Compuserve’s “The Biz” and then AOL’s “Travel Professionals Forum” and many other venues, I launched several communities of my own. Most notable were CruiseAgentDigest.com, a global community of cruise agents and Cruise-Chat.com, a global community of avid cruisers, both of which I subsequently sold and are still operating today. Today, I operate HBTACommunity.com a global social network for travel professionals with over 7,500 members.

So, I am going to put on my sweater and favorite shoes and share how to be a good neighbor in the new neighborhoods.

Don’t Treat Your Neighbors Like Sales Leads: Imagine going to your first neighborhood Bar-B-Q to socialize and meet your new neighbors. Upon arrival you are approached by a neighbor who says “Hi, I am John. I live in the brown house on the corner. Do you have life insurance? If so, I would like to review your policy to see if I could get you a better one. If not, when can we get together to discuss your buying one from me? Would Tuesday at 3pm be good for you?” You would probably excuse yourself and run for cover and wonder what you have gotten yourself into.

Now, imagine that you just joined a social network and your first post went something like “Hi, I am new to this forum is there anyone from Valley Center, CA out there?” Your first response is “Hi, I am John. I live in the Ohio and am a life insurance salesman. Do you have life insurance? If so, I would like to review your policy to see if I could get you a better one. If not, when can we get together to discuss your buying one from me? Would Tuesday at 3pm be good for you?”

Do I need to say more? Don’t ever advertise in a social setting. It not only degrades the neighborhood, it leaves a bad taste in your neighbor’s mouth.

Don’t Fight With Your Neighbors: Since your neighbors will be your neighbors for a long time, you shouldn’t pick fights with or respond to an inflammatory comment….ever. Nothing is more uncomfortable than having a verbal dispute that gets out of hand with your neighbor. It is uncomfortable for you, your neighbor and anyone else that happens to be listening and will likely label you a trouble maker, even if you didn’t start it.

It is the same online, only highly magnified. Never participate in online disputes and never flame anyone (to flame is to make an inflammatory statement). Your best bet, every time, if you are attacked is to turn the other cheek and remain calm and collected.

Be Nice and Respectful: Back at the Bar-B-Q, one of your new neighbors confides in you “See that guy over there? He is an idiot. And that other guy over there with the aloha shirt on? He cheats on his wife….and his wife is a tramp. The red headed guy over there is a real jerk”. Of course, you have already marked this particular neighbor as a gossip and not a very nice one at that.

Your online persona is developed by the messages that you post. If your messages come off as mean, nasty, gossipy and/or confrontational, that will be the image that you portray and people in the neighborhood won’t like you at all. As a rule of thumb, be twice as nice as you are in person and never say anything negative about anything or anyone.

Be Original, Don’t Be a CopyCat: Nobody likes a copycat in the neighborhood. So don’t copy other people’s content and post it as your own. Not only may you be violating someone’s copyrights to the content, people who recognize that you have stolen someone else’s content will think quite poorly of you. Never copy copyrighted content from a website and post it as your own. There are programs (www.Copyscape.com for one) that allow web publishers to identify copied content and take immediate action. Owners of the copyright do not even have to prove damages in order to collect from you for your infraction. Don’t copy anything.

Don’t Phish in Your Neighbor’s Pond: I live on a ranch in the country and am lucky enough to have a bass pond on my property. I keep the bass in the pond large because it is fun to catch and release them. One day I came home and one of my neighbors was at my pond with his kids. He had a huge stringer of bass that he had caught and was going to take home to eat. “Wow! The fishing in your pond is incredible” he claimed. I explained that, of course it was. If he raised deer on his property, I suspect that the hunting would be great too, but that doesn’t mean that I could go shoot his pet deer on his property pretending to be hunting in the wild. He got the message.

Social and professional communities look like rich environments for people to phish for traffic, leads, sales and potential new customers. Don’t do it! Phishing for any of these comes off as cheesy and unprofessional at best. And, it is downright unethical at worst. Resist the temptation to enter a forum and post something like “read my new article, it is really the best!” and include a link to your article somewhere else on the Internet. It is one thing to honestly recommend a link to content that is interesting and relative to a discussion, but it is entirely different to try and hijack traffic from a community. Phishing will get you negative results over time, no matter how good you think that you are at it. Neighbors are more comfortable staying in the neighborhood than they are being sucked into someone else’s.

I know that the foundation of this article is kind of silly, but I wanted to share some of the mistakes that we all make in a fun way. I hope that you have enjoyed the article. See you around the neighborhood.