Corvida has an awesome post on Chris Brogan’s blog called Decreasing Our Connections While Increasing Our Networks. The basic rundown of the post (which you should go read) is her exasperation over the amount of “friends” she has over various networks and the lack of a deeper and real connection. This conversation surfaces quite a bit when I am speaking to groups of people about social media. Where do you draw the line on relationship building in the social media environment?
From the post:
Maybe growth on some of these networks isn’t the best thing in the world. Should there be self-imposed limits on how many people you befriend? No because in the end, while your network growth may increase, your connection with your network still increases. However, the rate at which the connection can increase actually decreases. Did that make sense? Unless your friends are constantly questioning you or keeping tabs on you, it’s going to take a lot longer to make deeper connections the more your network grows.
We have been talking a lot about creating deeper relationships through social media. When you are adding hundreds of people on networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other networks it is hard to make the same connection as before! I wrote recently about turning friends, followers, and subscribers into a deeper connection. After all the purpose of sharing in a community driven environment should be relationship building whether for business or personal use.
The question has been presented: How do you take the massive amount of users on social networks and par them down to create meaningful relationships online? Quantify and Qualify.
Quantifying Your Social Media Experience
There are some networks where a huge following is necessary to gain the full experience of the site. Some would argue that Twitter is the site to use for a massive follower base. I am still torn over the notion of having a huge amount of followers on any site. I tend to use Facebook and Twitter to quantify my follower based. I want people to experience my personal side . Quantifying in a social media world basically means I gain an increased quality of experience based on the quantity of the people I am following.
Qualifying Your Social Media Experience
I qualify my niche networks in social media. I have found that I have an increase in quality without necessary having a huge quantity of followers on my geographically direct communities. Smaller Indiana and LinkedIN have been my niche quality sites for my social media experience. Smaller Indiana is a geographically located social network for people in Indiana. And for LinkedIN? I only tend to add people I have met in an offline environment on LinkedIN. My niche networks tend to be the place where there is a direct form of quality conversations.
How do you manage your networks? Do you find you get more or less quality based on the quantity of your friends or subscribers?
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You've raised another fascinating issue Kyle. I was discussing this only yesterday with colleagues. I forget who said it but the idea that 'you become the average the quality of the network of your contacts' got us really thinking about the nature and purpose of the networks we create. With that in mind I think we instinctively realise that we manage a constellation of networks, some might be highly arms length (lets say Twitter followers) that have information notification utility, others (lets say regular Blog commenters or Ning contacts) are more dialogic.(if there isn't such a word there is now!) others (lets say prospect and customer bases) are exchange and transaction orientated.
The idea you propose about 'quality' is interesting because it hinges of having a sense of the 'quality of the qualities' that are prefered for each network type (whatever they might be). Take this very comment as an example.
Just reading it (semantic analysis?) you would get a sense of which of your implicit networks I belonged to. If I had simply left a note saying 'Great post Kyle, good work keep 'em coming' you'd very likely categorise me as network type X, if I had left a comment saying something like 'Our clients measure us by how big their social media reach is, bigger is better' you'd have me as network type Y etc.
This all might seem like a statement of the very obvious and I also think that we might not necessarily be thinking about the conceptual nature of our networks as much as we might. Maybe falling back on fundamental marketing thinking might help here. Shouldn't we considering what the networks we have 'do' rather than describing what they 'are'?