When Should I Friend Everybody? Is it okay to dilute your social graph? Are you ready for the dark side?
A question cropped up at Gist a few weeks ago (disclaimer: Gist is a client) about whether it would be useful to import 20,000 Twitter followers into Gist. Would importing that many people be useful, or just noise? The larger question is: when is it okay to dilute your social graph? I think the answer is when you start to approach your professional career as a mini-marketer of your personal brand. In other words, when you look at social networks as a source of customers and friends. This is something a lot of people are starting to do. What I don’t know is if it will become a necessity for getting ahead (due to the competition).
Social networks have been around since the late 90s, but the term “social graph” became much more pervasive with the launch of the Facebook platform. A “social graph” is basically a model of a network of relationships. Facebook tries to model your real-life relationships. LinkedIn attempts to model your professional relationships. Twitter is known for lightweight asymmetrical (follower and following) relationships.
Each of these services’ attempts to represent your social graph are inaccurate. Your Facebook friends aren’t necessarily your real friends. Your LinkedIn connections aren’t always your real-world business connections. Your Twitter followers (and friends) often have little or no relationship to you in the off-line world.
With each service, there is an oversimplification of the weight (or strength) of the relationship (high school friends aren’t really friends). Also, since it is so easy to add connections, the important connections can be hard to find. However, each service does have its own unique ways to “weight the edges” of the social graph. Facebook seems the most personal. If two people are in a photo together the relationship can be inferred to be stronger. LinkedIn has references to companies where you may have worked together. Twitter has at-replies, re-tweets, and lists.
I’m also fascinated by the ability to game these services. For example on Facebook you could target specific interest groups, participate in discussion and become friends with the members of the group. LinkedIn has “Open Networking” groups that exist solely to “connect” with members of the group. Twitter is the easiest to game, because it is a well known that about 40% of the people you follow will follow you back. There is even software to exploit the follow-back phenomenon.
Why is this dangerous? This is dangerous because perception is everything. A colleague was astonished by someone who had 25,000 twitter followers. In fact, this was a person who was also following 25,000 people. In this case thousands of followers doesn’t indicate authority, it indicates a person gaming the system.
Similarly, having thousands of LinkedIn connections doesn’t mean you are a fabulous famous person. More likely it means you have spent hours cultivating your list. Social networks will always make it easy for users to invite their friends and create more connections. Therefore, they will always be game-able.
To be honest I empathize with the gamers a lot. Some of us just prefer to spend hours online finding new friends rather than doing it in real life. I think it is fun and useful to be aware of these techniques, and use them to when appropriate to boost your standing. Real world networking – speaking at a conference, shaking hands and having conversations – always trumps digital networking, but it takes much more effort. To achieve equal footing with digital connections, you need more of them.
When you start seeing your friends, connections, and followers as customers and friends, it follows logically that you should have as many as possible. At that point you will appreciate the social networks from a new perspective, and start optimizing for numbers rather than depth. Large numbers of followers means every link you drop will get more clicks. On LinkedIn, every search performed by others is more likely to reveal you as the expert. Having more connections (even weak connections) does have a unique value.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Greg Meyer 12.07.09 at 6:56 am
Adam -
I agree that perception is important. I also think that there is a growing cult of celebrity in larger society that makes people famous for being famous (think: Levi Johnston) and that it’s easy to be awed by social media practitioners with tens of thousands of contacts.
That being said, some of the people with many, many contacts are actually quite good at what they do: connecting people with similar or disparate interests to each other and facilitating the “weak ties” that allow you and I to ask a question on Vark and have it answered within minutes, accurately, by someone halfway around the world whom we’ve never met.
I have two suggestions for ferreting out the people who say they’re famous in social media and are actually not so famous — or, as you say, gaming the system — and they are relatively easy to implement. First, engage in a true conversation with the networker. Pick up the phone and talk to them, or send them a heartfelt email. I’ve had the experience of meeting a new friend with lots of teach me (great) and the experience of feeling that I’d walked into a timeshare presentation (sub-optimal). Second, you can find through various sources what other people say about the networker. If all references are positive (or most), then you’ve found someone for whom numbers of connections and the quality of that connection are in sync.
Thanks for your post — great thoughts!
-Greg
Neeraj 12.12.09 at 9:02 am
Twitter is a well known medium and it should be used with a lot of care especially since a lot of people are using it these days. Also nowadays twitter is getting more cautious in banning users who are having instant large number of followers as a means of advertising.
PowerPoint Templates 12.12.09 at 8:37 pm
Having a wide circle is not necessarily a bad thing. While you must be wary of diluting your message it is important that you make an attempt to expand your audience.
Jonathon 12.31.09 at 6:41 pm
Personally I keep my real friends as my friends on facebook and get rid of all that are not. Personally I don’t care for the 20k plus followers you can get on twitter, but for a business i can see it’s worth.
XC Systems 01.05.10 at 12:19 am
Social networks are becoming over abused. There are a lot of copy cat networks as well. It is quite overwhelming. MySpace has become a joke. Facebook is still good, but hopefully people continue to use it for it’s ultimate purpose.
Womens ski jackets 01.05.10 at 2:38 pm
I think places like twitter are now full of teens and internet marketers spamming everybody, I feel their time has passed.