Honesty. I believe that to create and maintain a relationship with your market, you need to be honest in all of your interactions. This creates trust which is no less important in this virtually connected world than it is face to face. It may seem useful to fabricate an image or a persona on a platform such as MySpace and use it to advance a portion of your goals, but this fragmenting actually leaves you with less of a foundation to stand on.

You or your company’s personal brand is what needs to be marketed from the beginning. Social media marketing is a slow process and, if for no other reason, you should avoid dishonesty as it takes time and effort away from growing the “real” you, the one that your audience will inevitably find out about anyways.

In a supporting vein, Harry Hoover with THINKing proposes “to thine own self be true.” Here, here Harry!

The inspiration for this post is credited to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Seperation - The Twist Image Blog. Check out his challenge to come up with social media marketing’s best practice.