To me, digital citizenship is like regular citizenship, except online. In today’s world, we need to not only practice being a good citizen in real life, but a good digital citizen online as well. Digital citizenship is composed of different elements such as proper etiquette, security, literacy, and healthy communication.
Personal branding is promoting yourself or your business through the use of search engines, blogging, social media, and more. It is creating an image for the public eye to see you by. It’s how the world views you. You can aid this process and hopefully steer it in a certain direction by utilizing social media and such in an effective manner, or you can let it happen on its own naturally.
I am a huge advocate for the whole “pay it forward” thing. This is important in the world of social media because it falls under proper etiquette in being a good digital citizen, if you ask me. Personally, I choose to treat others how I would want to be treated myself. I feel that if everyone did this, the world would be a much better place. People tend to do this less often in the digital world because they don’t have to come face-to-face with people as much. This is very unacceptable. I have no problem sharing a post or recommending a page or service, or whatever it is that is required of me, because I know that that person or business may do the same for me when I need it. Just knowing that they may even do it for another person or business that isn’t myself later on down the road makes it worth it to me.