We need to talk about Friends, Fans, “Likers”, Connectors and Followers

I love networking on the social web, as I do in real life. And I love having lots of friends and connections. In both realms I get great personal satisfaction out of being able to facilitate connections between people.

But I must admit that, for all that I have been participating actively online, one way or another, and in various groups, for over fifteen years, I think I still know how it all works offline better than I know how it works online.

It’s partly a problem about language.

I blame Facebook

Before Facebook I used to know what a friend was and I used to have a pretty good sense of the gradations of friendship and how types and levels of friendships can change over time. With Facebook – and other social networking platforms – the word “friend” became totally debased. A “friend” came to equal a keystroke, accepting a request from someone you did not know, and if you met them in real life might not want to even know, let alone be friends with.

And my personal belief (which I am happy to have challenged) is that once we accepted that a “friend” on Facebook was not necessarily a “friend” in the sense we were used to, an expectation built up on the social web that anyone should be willing to connect with anyone else, unless, say, they had reason to believe the other might be an axe murderer or some other unsavory type.

But for the benefit of those folks who just came in, being able to operate effectively as a business person on the social web involves, when it comes to the notion of being a friend, something akin to what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” .

With other ways of connecting online – as a “fan”, as “liking” someone or their Facebook page, as a connector or follower – there is not such a semantic challenge, but there can be a cultural challenge and for business there is a strategic business challenge.

There are two short versions of this challenge, one negative, one positive:

a) Negative: “If I decline or ignore this invitation to connect, fan, like, follow or whatever, could that be construed as offensive or arrogant and could that be bad for business?”

b) Positive: “What should my approach be to building connections on the social web, whether through initiating or responding, so that it fits my business plan strategically?”

Experts disagree with me

There are many people on various networks, some of them apparently quite successful or even extremely successful in business, who accept all or most invitations, send many invitations and pride themselves on the number of connections they have made.

I’m more selective. I have been told often by some colleagues why I am mistaken, lacking in understanding of networking, or just plain wrong. I am unrepentant and unbowed.

I am consoled by statistics such as that, at this writing, my 635 first level connections on LinkedIn connect me to 12,951,796 people in the larger LinkedIn network: enough to keep me busy.

No short answer

I don’t believe there is a short answer to all this. I believe the right answer will be the one that fits the business strategy, so your right answer will almost certainly be different from the right answer for my business or even for the business of someone else in your industry.

There is no shortage of people who will offer to show you, whether gratuitously or for a price, how to do your social networking “the right way”. My aim as a social business mentor is to help businesses work out the right strategy for themselves and build their own capability to operate effectively in this space.

In this I am guided by the aphorism (with a bit of manipulation of the gender references):

“Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day: teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” (Original author unknown)

Would you like more on this topic?

I want to do some more thinking and consider writing some more posts about this topic. If you have comments to make, want to agree, disagree, contradict, or share stories, I hope you will toss your contribution in the pot here to help me cook up something that can be useful to those of us who still, after all these years, are finding our way on the social web.

Image credit: “Good Friends, Béziers” Anne in Béziers photostream, Flickr, Creative Commons

I’ve been having an interesting time – for “interesting” read “time-consuming and frustrating but I hope it’s worth it” – working out how to communicate a particular message to friends on Facebook. For experienced Facebook users what I’ve learned the hard way will probably seem terribly obvious, but someone might find some value in my sharing the experience.

And in the glorious tradition of blogging, I’ll have had the pleasure of getting it off my chest.

Background is that in my previous post on my current adventures with Facebook, I promised to write about making my new Social Media Roadmap page on Facebook more functional.

In looking at putting some time into the project I had been gratified and encouraged by the very positive response I’d had to inviting people to sign up on the new page, first in the somewhat pressured context of the Facebook page name “landrush” and subsequently. From the initial minimum 100 “fans” I had needed to be able to submit my name of choice for the page, the number has grown now to 186.

But as I was about to start on the process of pimping the Social Media Roadmap page I noticed that on my Facebook profile I have some 763 friends. It occurred to me that some of those friends might want to know about the Social Media Roadmap page and might not have picked up on my invitations, on Twitter, on my Facebook wall, etc.

Should be easy, I thought: just send a message to my friends.

Because they’re my friends, right? So where is the button to message all my friends? Can’t find it. Ask around. “Oh no”, I’m told by a friend (as in the offline version of “friend”) who knows about these things, “Facebook won’t let you send a message to all your friends at once.” This is apparently to protect us all from spamming: understandable, but right now that’s a pain. So what can I do? “Simple” says my friend, “you create groups and message them. But remember there can’t be more than 20 people in a group.”

Here’s where it got interesting. Whether by design or indifference, the Facebook setup is extremely user-unfriendly when it comes to linking friends together in groups.

And one of the first things I learnt in the process was that, technically, what I needed to create were not “groups” but “lists” (“group” means something else in Facebook).

First I had to click on the Friends tab in the main menu bar. That gave me pages of friends’ names and photos and at the top of the list a new menu bar with three tabs: Create New List, Edit List, Delete List. I noticed also that on the left hand side I already had some lists I had created at some point: but they were fairly selective and would not do for the current purpose.

Only the tab Create List was highlighted at this point, so I clicked that and a popup box appeared, with a field for the group name, and friends’ names and numbers displayed three across. There are two ways to add a name to the group, namely by typing into a separate field the beginning letters of a name or by clicking on a member’s picture. As you add names a tally is registered at the top of the box (“Selected”). The aim for me with the current exercise was to add no more than 20 to a list.

A complication I made for myself, consciously, was to exclude from the lists any of the people already on the Social Media Roadmap page. I did not think it would be a good look to be sending a notice about the page, or invitation to join, to someone already on the page.

As I could not find any way to export the list of names on the Social Media Roadmap page (as I can do, for instance, and with email addresses, with my connections on LinkedIn), I set up a spreadsheet and put in some time copying each name from the page into a spreadsheet.

I then cross-referenced that list of those already on the page with each of the new lists of friends and removed the duplicates from the friends’ lists.

So the current situation is that I have 36 lists of names of Facebook friends who have not yet become fans of the Social Media Roadmap page. As I understand, one of the advantages of the new page setup is that I will be able to message everyone at once without having to do sub-lists.

Over the next day or two I will message the 36 lists of friends progressively about the Social Media Roadmap page and hope some of them will see that as something of sufficient potential interest and value to them to consider becoming “fans”.

Then I will look at ways to make the page more interesting and helpful. And I intend to post about that in due course.