Connecting vs Connection: Friend Volume vs Friend Quality in Social Business Networking

The number one place I see business people getting it wrong on Facebook is in the way they handle the “friends” issue. And the problem is that one size most assuredly does not fit all. We’re bringing our idea that volume is somehow better into our online world and it most assuredly is not.

With tools that facilitate deeper relationships based on commonalities, collaboration and free information sharing, the quality of your one on one connection makes the most difference, and will help you spread the best, and farthest connection.

Sites that are primarily the connective tissue of networking rather than a representation of the entire body, are going to be based on number of contacts. I feel that this connection is of a lesser quality and that tools which don’t help us facilitate on-going connections by design are ultimately going to usurped by the former kind. But that’s another discussion.

For a quick and dirty analysis though, we can take the example of the way people use LinkedIn vs Facebook, as the clash of these two titans can be summed up - though perhaps not fairly - with the theory of numbers.

With LinkedIn I’ve observed that many seem to have a focus on the quantity of numbers, and seems to use it as more of an online collaborative rolodex. Whereas Facebook is assigned the role of managing the quality of these connections, not because it is necessarily a “better” tool, but because it is viewed to have a different function.

The volume of information that is auto-pushed to you through the News Feed make it harder to focus on the number of people in your group rather than the quality of yoru interactions. Whether Facebook had this planned at the beginning or not, it’s smart, because I can also choose to use Facebook on the rolodex level only if I so choose.

LinkedIn feels to me like it’s stuck on connecting, where Facbook feels like it’s making me emphasize the connection.

Right or wrong isn’t the point. It could just be about which tools is best for what, not that one has to rule the day. The point here is, which one “fits” me? Which one will enhance my life will depend on what kind or level of connection I want to facilitate.

When I’m in LinkedIn, I feel a numbers pressure.

My value as an expert will be measured based on how many questions I answer, and how many of those get scored well. My success as a networker seems to be based on the number of connections I have, and how much of my profile is filled out. The screen gives me prompts to keep driving my numbers ever higher.

People, correctly or not, chose to base their connection with me on how many people I know when I’m at LinkedIn.

But I say, so what if I have only 13 connections? If one of them is in a key position at Microsoft, two of them are at companies absorbed by Google, one is an Exec at Yahoo, five more are evangelists of my brand, and the other four are valued clients, my network may be better than someone else’s circle of 500 connections.

If their connections are lackluster, superficial people who are just in it to rack up the numbers, then don’t I have the better group?

Then, of course, there’s the idea that I must carefully consider who to accept connections with, because these people are going to ask me to connect them further to others. Should I leave my Microsoft contact off my list for fear they’ll be bombarded with requests through me? Should I include one of my more high profile brand enhancers as a status symbol?

Without group leaders like Vincent Wright, I wouldn’t have any idea what to then do with these connections. And if we clearly need such group faciliatators, why isn’t LinkedIn hiring those people and their companies to do this and folding them into the process?

I am becoming conscious of the fact that this is going to sound like I’m picking on LinkedIn. I’m not. It’s a great tool for what it is. And unlike most people, I don’t think it needs to become like Facebook. In fact, I’m looking at its potential and realizing, through my time at Facebook, that with a better toolset, it could completely usurp Facebook’s dominance in the business community.

This isn’t much of a stretch. LinkedIn has everything but the platform and the connection philosophy. If they got that right, they could completely dominate this space and recover their head start.

A very important thing LinkedIn could easily have over Facebook is a better way to organize who is who in our online rolodex. Stop calling everyone friend or connection, both of you.

Make tiers of connections and link them to types of profiles.

As a business person, I’d pay you for this functionality, and you could leave the existing versions free - let me say who is my client type of friend, who is my colleague, who my brand evangelists are, who my key friend influencers are, etc.

It’s easy enough, just

• add type of friend into my choices when I add people, something that gives me better ways to explain than “met randomly,”
• let me decide if that is visible to the friend or not, and
• give me a blank space for people who transcend categories.

But, back to the issues at hand.

Let’s take the case of Facebook now.

They have the connection bit close to perfect.

Why?

Because there’s no pressure.

If someone wants access to my friends, they can say they know me as a way of introduction, and it’s perfectly easy for the desired contact to backchannel to me any questions they have about whether or not to add them.

Most of the time they can look at my profile or groups and make the determination from seeing the person’s conduct in either place.

There’s no pressure for number of connections either.

In fact, connections to people who have smaller networks are often desired, on the basis that it’s hard to maintain the same level of interaction with 500 people than it is 50. The theory is that you must dilute the connection, as you must your attention, when you have that many people’s daily news being pushed to you. On the other hand, if I want to have 500 “friends” and use Facebook more to broadcast to them, than to interact with them, I can.

My pet peeve with Facebook isn’t about a pressure to have a quantity of people connected to me, it’s that they call these connections “friends.”

I’m a child of the 70s, so while I don’t want people in neat boxes, I do want to be able to mentally sort them into their appropriate Venn diagrams. The reason is that my conversations and visibility with my connections are not one size fits all.

I want my best friend from college to see the dude I made with the South Park Character Creator. My new client probably doesn’t care as much about that as he would the latest headlines at my corporate website promotion blog.

On the other hand, maybe I’m a dinosaur, and an American one at that.

Make your own observations of this in your life, but I find that in my surroundings, I’m seeing that the definition of “friend” has already evolved for our generation and those to come, with levels of friendship being the only attribute left in play.

Furthermore, our anal clinging to one definition of the world friend is distinctively American. Our European counterparts often say of us that was are easy to meet, but hard to get to know.

Many of my Italian friends aren’t as particular about saying whether a friend is a friend from work, a friend they grew up with, a friend they went to college with, or a person who frequents the tavern they own.

Perhaps the issue isn’t whether we should use Facebook or LinkedIn, but whether we should keep ties to both for their different roles in our lives, as business people.

Then the new question would be this:

Should we continue to evolve in this direction and embrace the new distinctions with new language sets (Facebook friend/connection vs co-worker vs childhood friend)?

OR we could decide in our lexicon that the word “friend” has a distinction meaningful enough for us to demand a change of terminology from our social networks.

Maybe it’s the techonlogy of friend sorting and counting has outgrown the terminology, and that’s where we get stuck.

After all, whether to have as large a group of friends as possible goes to whether or not we are capable of managing data influxes. Instead of arguing about whether it’s smart to push your friendship volume to the limit, or carefully manage your friend quality (or somehow, both) is just a personal choice, with different things working for everyone.

Volume of online connections is about whether you can manage a depth of connection - some people can with 200 people, some only with 20. Measurement by number seems like it misses the point.

[tags]friends, life, lockergnome, facebook friends, facebook. facebok, linkedin, linkedin connections, numbe of connection, social networking, social business networking[/tags]