Relationships and social networks
Why are relationships important?
Whenever you read something related to social media, you will read about relationships. On Facebook you can only invite your “friends”. LinkedIn will not allow you to connect with people you do not know. Twitter gives you more freedom; You can follow whoever you want, but they may not follow you. It’s about building and maintaining relationships. Chris Brogan, a social media guru and avid blogger, posted a blog criticizing people on Twitter for trying to “sell” you their products before they know you. He went so far as to say he doesn’t follow anyone who has an auto-reply Tweet – every time someone follows you, an auto-reply thank you comes out. Their main concern was not the automatic response, but the additional request to click on the stranger’s website or try their exciting new product or service. “How do you know I want your service if you don’t know me?” I ask.
Being new to Twitter, I was shocked by this angry post and all the comments that followed. Most people agreed with Brogan. Most said they “hate” such automatic responses. Some, like me, did not realize that this was not the proper “network etiquette” on Twitter. Some, like me, had to go back and check our autoresponders to remove the offending links. All this leads me to think about the importance of the relationship in social networks.
Clara Shih on Facebook Era tells us that most people on social media sites have very few strong contacts. In fact, most people on Facebook have only 10-20 strong contacts, although they may have 200 or more friends. LinkedIn used to require that you actually meet the person as a colleague, having worked with them or shared a group with them before you could invite them to connect with you. This has changed and now you can also invite “friends”, not just the people you worked with. What all of this means is that most of us have far more weak connections than strong connections. How do we develop a relationship with our weak connections?
According to Shih, it is through active use of those weak connections and good use of strong connections that relationships are formed. Let’s take a look at one of the reasons why relationships matter.
Johari’s window
Two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham developed a model of social interaction called the Johari Window in their book On Human Interaction in the 1960s. What this model teaches us is that people interact with each other on the basis of four quadrants :
Quadrant 1: The open area contains all the things that we know about ourselves and that we are willing to share with others. Examples of these kinds of things can be our love for animals or our propensity to travel or our devotion to our family. Our family and friends fit very well among the people with whom we share our Open Area. Most of the people who interact through social networks use blogs to share about themselves. All blogging manuals tell us that blogging evolved from the concept of web-log. In other words, it is like a diary on the web. It is your web diary. If you simply write about your products or services and never tell us about yourself, we will stop reading your blog. The idea of Web 2.0, which included the interactive Web or two-way communication, evolved because people wanted to communicate with each other. Once communication becomes two-way, relationships are formed.
Quadrant 2: The blind area contains what others know about us, but what we do not know about ourselves. Some people call these our blind spots. Perhaps we tend to talk a lot about ourselves; perhaps we are too lenient with our children. We all have blind spots that others see but elude us. We are so close to ourselves that we cannot see our own strengths and weaknesses. A good example of how to discover the blind area comes from Naked Conversations. When Microsoft hired Robert Scoble, they described him as someone who “lets his flaws hang on his sleeve. He’s curious as a child and it’s hard not to like and trust him.” Being curious as a child allows you to open up to your blind area and earn the trust of others. Listening to what others are saying allows you to discover your blind spots. When people slap you for being too authoritative on your blog or being too fanatical on Facebook, pay attention; They may be discovering something about you that you didn’t know. Social networks allow us to know what others think of us, whether for better or for worse.
Quadrant 3: The Hidden Area, things about us, our products or our services that we don’t want others to know constitute the Hidden Area. Obviously, as online communication grows and expands, the likelihood of us keeping things hidden decreases. The challenge that social media presents us is breaking down our walls and allowing others to see who we really are. Social media allows us to expose ourselves to scrutiny. When we blog and share it with our Facebook friends, we tell them something about ourselves that we may not say face to face. When we find a delicious little quote that we post for our Twitter followers, we let them know something about us that they might not know. Who are the people you share your hidden area with? People you trust. Once you trust your friends on Facebook or your followers on Twitter, you start building a relationship. Someone once said, “Information is like sand. The more you try to hold onto it, the more it escapes you.”
Quadrant 4: The Unknown Area, the Johari Window contains a quadrant where we keep things that are deep in our subconscious mind that neither we nor others know. These things remain undiscovered until we unleash our creativity. Luft and Ingham tell us that once we listen to others and share openly, in other words, we pay attention to our blind spots and release information from our Hidden Area, we open the door to the Unknown Area. Social media provides opportunities to listen to our connections and to share and talk with them. Bernoff and Li at Groundswell advise us time and again that the challenge of social media is not which tool to use, but to discover ways to speak and listen to the tide.
Speaking and listening creates a very large Open Area that helps us to be authentic and transparent. Authenticity and transparency build trust. And trust, by the way, creates relationships. That is why we strive to establish relationships. Probably the most successful female entertainer of our time, Oprah gave the graduation speech at Wellesley College in 1997. Some call this speech the best speech of its kind ever made. Why? “Authenticity oozes from every paragraph of this speech,” Richard Green said in an interview with USA Weekend. The power of the opening works not only for Oprah in keynote speeches, but it can work for you as well if you are willing to tear down the walls and welcome the crowds.