Are You In The Collection Business?

Written on March 15, 2009 by Adam in Marketing & Advertising
7 Comments - Leave a comment!

Quality not quantity. How long have we heard this battle cry? We council our clients that it’s about quality. It’s now about amassing millions of email addresses if only 10 of them are people who want to hear from you. It’s not about buying lists from Experian and direct mailing the entire country. These types of frivolous concepts are expensive, wasteful, time consuming, and take focus away from reality.

A trend that’s been on the rise for a while, but now getting absurd is people focusing on the number of followers they have on twitter and the number of friends they have on Facebook. This isn’t limited to people who don’t know any better. Industry leaders like Sarah Evans have started focusing on this as well. I asked Sarah why she wanted to be friends with someone on Facebook that she didn’t know. Her response was

it’s another way for me to get to know ppl. plus there’s a way to create groups on Facebook.

Gotta tell you, while I respect Sarah a hell of a lot, I’m just not buying it. People like Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur, and Chris Brogan have either reached Facebook’s 5000 friend limit or are close to it. Please tell me how it is you can consider 5000 people your “friend?”  Can you really have a meaningful dialogue with these people?  Maybe I’m missing something…and believe me I totally could be.  I’m not infallible.

Are we simply collecting friends like we did garbage pail kid cards in the 80s?

Think I’m crazy? OK, there’s now a service that asks the question

What If You Could Press Just One Button & Automatically Start Getting 1000’s Of Legitimate New Twitter Followers On Autopilot… Even If Nobody Knows Who You Are Now?

Of course the service promises to help you get those 1000s of followers.

People we’re missing the point. How can you maintain solid, strong, and meaningful relationships with millions of followers and “friends.” You can’t. I’d argue that focusing on more hurts your ability to create value.

Make no mistake, VALUE, is the commodity we should be trading. People are not cards, comic books, or coins to be collected. If you treat them that way they’ll eventually treat you that way and trade you in for something else.

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  • Delbert Leach
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  • Misbah
    wow, three replies in one evening. i'm on a roll! :)

    even the most ebullient, charismatic social butterfly couldn't possibly have 5000 or even a thousand friendships of value. definitely followers--sort of a six degrees thing-- but of those thousands, many of them are there just for the association or do share some very distant, indefinable connection. but take my small list for example. i have 89 friends, most of whom i've known for a long time in some definitive capacity and whose friendships i'd like to think i could count on but never take for granted. but even of those, some of them are simply fairweather, and i'm okay with that. but would i count on them in a bind? not a chance. out of those 89, i know who my friends are. they're the ones whose profiles i visit regularly or whom i know would pick up on something subtle that was OOC for me, whose birthdays i never forget (and who don't forget mine) and so forth. the rest, i wouldn't say i'm collecting so much as expanding a given network to learn more and share more (like with rabbit rescue/adoption/education). fb is great for social networking and i suppose the whole point of that is to be able to cast a wider net to reach a broader audience. and maybe out of any new connections i cultivate from that particular network, i may form some genuine friendships.
    however, i keep my numbers around 100 because i can honestly say i value each of those friendships and/or connections (apparently more than i value my time! i'd have been halfway done cleaning my room by now. ah, procrastination.)
  • I think the word 'friend' may be misused here...

    To me, on places like twitter or facebook, the word behind the word 'friend' is really 'connection.' The idea is that we are making 'connections' with people, even if it is just in a small way. And it's not about the size, quantity, or measurement of the connection... it is simply connection. Through that, like anything in life, connections can flower in ways you never perhaps imagined.

    Even though the term being used is 'friend,' what we are really doing is cultivating connections. A very important differentiation to make!
  • I agree about value. And I understand that many folks will only follow a certain number of people on Twitter and others will only OK people they are actually friends with.

    And while I do not friend collect, I do have more followers/following/friends than some feel is realistic.

    But I define friend differently on facebook. that is there term, not mine. Same goes for twitter.

    At the end of the day I do agree that there needs to be value in any of these connections. But I also think that people make their own choices on how they connect with online and numbers do not necessarily apply.

    I also grokked on this in video form: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP3bt_Xu9ys
  • Yes I agree with you Adam. I on occasion will friend someone I dont know if I find there background interesting. I do press the block and ignore alot because I do value the word "friend". I take that relationship word very seariously. I also make people aware of that value when I link in with them through linkedin.com. If you are not "friends" yet with someone I am all I request is an introduction be done. This way people can value my relationship with them and vice a versa. I get a very postive response with this request!
  • New twist on the phrase, "I don't know where we're going, but we're making good time." We may not be providing value, but we're making up for it in scale.

    People still follow the scale model and hope to build value afterward. Others build value step by step.

    Ironically, the people in the large followers camp would argue economies of scale in their method. That's a fallacy. They exert more effort with large groups of people with small conversion rates.

    I communicate regularly with 20 followers out of 150+. I think I could expand that to maybe 100, which would make my effective range around 800. Beyond that and it's noise.
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