One thing I’ve focused on through the years here is social etiquette. I’ve written about it a few times: all the way back to 2011, in 2012, and twice in 2017 both in November and December. So today we are going to touch on that a bit. First, some background.
I’m someone who loves to include. It’s in my DNA. I had way too many people at my wedding and both kids’ Mitzvahs because I just can’t live with myself if I leave someone out.
I used to get really angry at people who would tag the people they went out to dinner with when I wasn’t included. And the kids posting their birthday parties on social when my kids weren’t invited? Don’t get me started.
The more the merrier, I always say.
You’ll see those memes that say “teach your kids not everyone is going to include them.” Um… no. How about teaching your kids to INCLUDE?
So, I’m pretty passionate about this in my personal life.
In business, when we work on something with another brand, collaborating is a great way to simply tell the world about that collaboration. By clicking “collaborate” on a post about another brand, once that brands accepts it it will show up in their feed as well as ours. Fantastic, right? More views? More reach? More potential engagement? It’s a perfect fit!!!!!
Well.. not so fast.
You may think it’s great to give them that extra exposure, but you might be wrong.
A few years ago I wrote about the pitfalls of spam-tagging. You can’t just start tagging people or brands just because you want them to help lift up your content. It’s disingenuous. The same is true for collaborating. And… sometimes it can just be too much.
If your brand has had an event with another brand and you want to invite that other brand to collab, GREAT. But consider these issues:
- Your branding may look wrong on their grid. So they may not want to accept a collaboration. Don’t get your feelings hurt, work with them to come up with a post that works for both of you before making the request.
- Maybe you already collaborated with this brand a few days ago and they feel once was enough. That’s fair, no? So maybe subsequent posts can be simple tags to the other brand can share it in their story.
- You might be trying to collab with them on something that they didn’t collab with you in real life and simply goes against their brand messaging. Also… fair.
There are some great reasons to collaborate with another brand, but make sure you are doing it respectfully.
by 
