What if we lived in a world where the number of Twitter followers you had was largely irrelevant? What if people cared as much about the quality of their interactions as they do about the quantity of interactions they have?
It might sound crazy to abandon the idea of reach but try it for a while and you’ll realise how much latent value we are all failing to take advantage of among the existing social connections in our networks.
Seth says it best
Watch this great short video of Seth explaining why it’s important to seek out the quality in your social interactions instead of just more numbers:
At the end of the day what use are the connections we have if we aren’t servicing them properly? As Sonny Gill says in his recent post Are you shortcutting your community?,
Personally, I see nothing genuine in building your community by participating in a link-a-thon, which unfortunately furthers the assumption that social media is about the numbers and is what drives success. Sorry, but it is and will always be about the relationships and subsequent conversations that go on with yourself and those community members.
The value here is largely in the details of those interactions and how they relate to your strategic objectives.
The devil is in the details, so revisit your existing social connections
Chances are that in the rush to build the size of our social networks and boost the number of weak ties we have we are actually missing out on maximising the latent value we have in our existing relationships.
Somewhere along the way many of us seem to have fallen into the trap of equating value solely with scale. While it’s true that having a big (read: broad or wide) network can be beneficial, if we seek to build size at the expense of deepening the social relations we have with existing contacts we’re actually missing out on a great proportion of the value of those relationships.
A more innovative approach to connection?
This is exactly the topic I spoke about at the FastBreak E-festival of Ideas, part of the Australian Innovation Festival. I was asked to discuss innovation in relation to connection. The video below is of all of the presentations that day. I wholeheartedly recommend them all (kudos Jye, Isadore, Matt and Elias), but if you would like to skip to my discussion of the need to capitalise on the existing latent value in our social networks then I take the stage at 8:25 and speak for just over four minutes. If you’re happier reading my notes, then you can download them as a PDF here:
What if people cared as much about the quality of their interactions as they do about the quantity of interactions they have? Well then we’d all be part of far more valuable social networks.
What do you think? What tactics are you using to get more value from your existing social networks?
[Cool retro image thanks to Creative Commons and Flickr user battlecat]
