“Don’t do unto others what you do not want others do unto you.”

This is the golden rule, same as true in social media, we can turn that around and make it “do unto others what you want others do unto you”. You want your message to spread all over the social media world, you want others to listen to you, therefore read others’ messages and listen to others.

You cannot be successful in social media by yourself, you and you alone. You have got to have audience and others that could help you in your purpose. You can take advantage of the people in social media with the same purpose as you, to be heard of. Everyone in social media want people to listen to them, so do you, therefore people should learn to listen to each other.

A post in Socialized by the title “Five Easy Steps to Social Media Karma” gives us the idea on how to build a give and take relationship in social media :

• Leave a comment on a friend’s blog. Commenter identity systems have made this a little harder than it used to be, but it still takes less than five minutes. Just take the time to read your friend’s blog post and offer a relevant comment or reaction. And it’s the gift that gives back, because generally you can leave a link back to your own blog or web site.
• Like or comment on a Facebook status update, RT a tweet on Twitter, Digg or Stumble a blog post. There are over 200 million people on Twitter. How many have never had an RT? How many bloggers have ever had more than five Diggs? It’s a very inexpensive holiday gift.
• Respond back to an @ on Twitter. Often I ask a question on Twitter for a piece I am writing, or because I need help with a client, and I get a handful of replies. I’ll sometimes engage people and other times not. I believe in interaction on Twitter but not chit chat. Because of my work, I want my timeline to be free of tweets that are of no use to others. Tweets like “thank you,” “lol,” “for sure,” and “I agree” are meaningless to anyone who wasn’t in the original conversation. One solution is to say “I agree with you, there are certainly some companies who should not be on Twitter,” so you are responsive to an individual and you express your opinion in a tweet that stands by itself. Another solution is to say “Screw it. I’ll just be nice to someone without considering how it makes me look.” It’s nice to let people know they matter, and that you appreciate their contributions.
• Give credit when linking. If you refer to someone else via your blog or Facebook (or anywhere else character count isn’t an issue), link to them and identify them by name. Link to their blog, or their Twitter I.D. Name them. Extol and praise them. Instead of writing “according to one blogger” write, “according to Kevin Minott’s excellent Komverse blog.”
• Praise publicly and freely. Correct privately. If you feel someone deserves a compliment, give it openly. If you see a typo or fact error in a post, and you genuinely think it matters to the person who posted it, send a DM, IM or email kindly pointing it out. This is considered helpful. To do so publicly is rude.

Social media is like life itself, you cannot be on your own, you cannot talk to yourself or whatever, as the old saying goes, “No man is an island.”