From Revolution to Constitution. That was the path our country took in its infancy – from the triumph of independence to the establishment of a set of values to live and govern by. It’s normal to put standards in place after the dust settles, no matter what kind of revolution has taken place.

The social media revolution that has swept the online world in the past decade or so is no different. Marketers have been leveraging social media long enough that there should be a set of standards in place that we can all abide by – a constitution if you will. Therefore, I am proposing a social media constitution for marketers.

Since we still apply the constitution our founding fathers wrote over 200 years ago, I figured I would draft the social media constitution under the same structure. Let’s begin with the preamble:

“We the People of Web 2.0, in order to form a more perfect online community, establish relevance, ensure user-friendliness, provide for fresh user-generated content, promote related web content of our peers, and secure the Blessings of inbound links to ourselves, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Social Media of the Internet.”

The following seven articles encompass the key behavioral ethics marketers should consider in their social networking efforts.

Article One: Relevance – The information supplied in your social media channel should always be relevant and useful to your target audience. In order to keep a loyal following, your audience is more likely to revisit your channel if they know it’s a reliable source for on-topic information. Keeping to one theme will help identify you as an authority in the online community.

Article Two: Collectiveness – This may be an obvious one, but it can’t be reiterated enough. The purpose of social media is the networking aspect. Allowing all voices to be heard will generate buzz and drive more traffic. Plus, search engines love fresh user-generated content. One action item - make tagging and bookmarking easy for your users by applying a social media bookmark aggregator code on your channel page.

Article Three: Accountability – Social media is an effective channel for companies to handle reputation and brand management as it allows for direct interaction with their audience. Some marketers steer away from opening up a social media channel in fear of opening up the stage for negative comments, but avoiding the negativity isn’t usually the best option. If your audience has gripe, they’re going to find somewhere to post it, so why not own the stage where they can communicate their opinions, allowing you to facilitate and manage the conversation.

Article Four: Endorsement – While generating buzz and obtaining links would naturally seem like priority number one, listing outbound links is also crucial to your success. List blogs which link back to you with permalinks, trackbacks or recent linking blogs (like the Yahoo & Google blogs do). It’s all about giving your contributors and audience the recognition they deserve. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you in the short term, it will in the long term.

Article Five: Flexibility – Like the Article five in the US Constitution: the ability to make amendments, as the authors were clearly aware that changes would be necessary from time to time if the Constitution was to endure and cope with the effects of the anticipated growth of the nation. Flexibility within social media involves keeping an open eye for new channels and adapting to the changes that are sure to evolve in this constantly changing online universe.

Article Six: Restraint – You know that email opt-in you subscribed to and then unsubscribed yourself after discovering they sent 17 emails before lunchtime?  Yeah, the same goes for social media as you don’t want to annoy your audience with message blasting or any other “loud” conduct.

Article Seven: Benevolence – Finally, an attitude of goodwill will go a long way with your audience because it shows you are making a solid effort to add value to the online community. Good humor is always a good thing too, especially if it fits into your subject area, as people tend to link to clever content.

If our founding fathers read these seven articles for social media today, I think they would not only be scratching their wigs upon reading “secure the blessings of inbound links”, but also at ease with the integrity that these guiding principles for social media encourage. Social media is what we make of it, so let’s try to add the most value to Web 2.0 by practicing strong ethics that set the stage for others to follow.