Photo Credit: Fabian Oefner
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What is Friendship in a Connected World?
In Part 1 of this article (http://goo.gl/GSA4w), I argued that there are two reasons why there is, in fact, no real "social network marketing" revolution yet, just an evolution, and I focused on the first of the two reasons: 1) Most people don't trust their "friends" as much as marketers think they do. 2) Today's concept of "friendship" is evolving, becoming something different than yesterday's concept, and tomorrow's will be even more different.
The second issue, as stated above, is that today's concept of "friendship" isn't yesterday's, and today's isn't tomorrow's. To draw an analogy: at one time everyone lived in small towns. Everyone knew everyone else and, in general, your friends and acquaintances were decided by the geography of where your were born.
Marketers, such as they were, marketed to people based on that social dynamic: your milkman, your reporter, your butcher, your baker, and your candlestick maker weren't just people you did business with, they were friends, neighbors, even relatives or in-laws. Even today businesses in small towns, even large businesses, are obliged to at least feign the "small town spirit" of yesteryear.
Then big cities formed. People came from far and wide, strangers to one another, and made friends and acquaintances in new ways that often had little or nothing to do with being born near each other. Businesses in big cities might still promote, or at least feign, a community spirit, but in reality you probably don't know your restaurateur, your Wal Mart greeter, your grocery clerk, or even the guy who runs the convenience store at the end of your block.
Something similar is taking place in the modern, connected world of the web and mobile. People now meet each other from thousands of miles away, even all the way across the world, and get to know each other in ways they never could have before (at least without meeting in real life, and possibly in some ways even real life could never have allowed).
Even on Facebook, people are meeting people they never knew or would ever have known in real life, and this is even more true on other social networks like Twitter, Google+, and others where most or all of the people you meet will be people you have never met, and might never meet, in real life. Strangers become colleagues, friendships form, people even fall in love, often without ever meeting in person.
This process will only accelerate as the technology evolves, bringing revolutionary changes in how we connect. Imagine the direct sharing, via electronic communication, of thoughts, feelings, and even physiological sensations; imagine the ability to inhabit a multi-sensory immersive virtul environment that looks and feels real or nearly real; imagine augmented reality overlayed on top of the real world.
All these, and perhaps things we haven't even predicted, are nearer to fruition than you might imagine. Physical proximity and interaction are ceasing to be regarded as the "touchstone" of human relations, and future developments will devalue these even more. This might horrify you, or it might excite you, but there can be little doubt that it's coming either way.
While marketers drool over an antiquated idea of friendship, i.e. those you have met in real life, as the holy grail of peer-to-peer marketing, the world is moving on. Social networking didn't create these things, but it is the evolution of a culture shift that began with things like the early Bulletin Board Systems, web forums, etc... What every social revolution has in common with the state of affairs that precedes it is uniting individuals and groups with other individuals and groups in providing their social needs. It is only the specifics of those needs that change.
When Facebook moved from college students to their friends, family, relations, acquaintances old and new, and from there to multiple degrees of acquaintance (friend of a friend, cousin of an aunt, etc...), marketers drooled, when in reality they should have felt slightly horrified. College students share a social scene, to a degree, the "college scene", which naturally leads to particular marketing strategies with obvious and measurable return value.
But how much do people share with their old classmates from grade school, their grandmothers, their coworkers, or the friend of a friend that they have never met, that a marketer should place a high value on? Obviously Facebook fulfilled some needs, but not always the ones that marketers tend to think it fulfilled.
So what does this culture shift mean? For social network marketing, it means even more than it does yet for society in general, because the shift is taking place precisely where this marketing is targeted: online, for social network engagers, those for whom it is more than a fad or a thing of passing value (even if particular social networks are fads).
Online, your real life friendships do not necessarily translate one-to-one. The person who would talk to you about shoes or cars in real life, might hammer you with politics you find abhorrent online; the person who might tell funny anecdotes in person might discuss the minutia of topics foreign to your vocabulary online; the person you know from church might annoy you with pictures of their cats; etc... The people you know in real life, when it comes to your onlife life, are like the people from the small town you grew up: you might continue to identify with them, but not necessarily in the same ways, or for the same reasons.
Those who most strongly influence you online, or are most strongly influenced by you, will more likely be those with whom your online habits and interests best align, regardless of what you or they might be like in real life or in other settings. For marketers, the key is not to find out who someone's mother, brother, best friend, teacher, boss, or pastor is, or with whom you share the most demographic factors or the most real world interests, necessarily, but to find out who and what shapes your online activity, or is shaped by yours. A sharing of interests, especially when passionate and based on trust and respect, is more likely to be valuable, even between "strangers".
Admittedly, I'm once again oversimplifying things somewhat, but not as much as marketers have tended to oversimplify social network marketing. Even Facebook's billion users are not an army of bots spreading the efforts of marketers like wildfire to friends and acquaintances, all of them ready to empty their wallets at the first encouragement from anyone they know, or whom someone they know happens to know.
Only such a preposterously simplistic view of social network marketing could have generated the sky high valuation of Facebook or the absurd "ghost town" meme that treats tens of millions of active users on Google+ as worth less than Pinterest's much smaller army of digital scrap-bookers. Everyone, it seems, must be ascribed degrees of separation and a dollar value, even though the very social networks themselves did not necessarily grow with these in mind, and any dollar values now ascribed are only averaged across the total revenue of a company.
Facebook's billion users might well be worth a hundred billion dollar valuation, but not the company itself; the full value of social networking marketing is largely intangible, and lacks the immediacy one would need to ascribe long-term or short-term dollar values.
Social media analytics notwithstanding, the value of social networks and their users is based on a confluence of factors, many of them intangible or impossible to reliably predict or reproduce. It cannot be fully quantified in terms of usage measures or user counts or degrees of separation, cannot be fully measured in terms of revenue, and cannot be fully apprehended in a manner limited to our four-dimensional space-time.
Those things merely scratch the surface, and the single-minded pursuit of quantity over quality, causality over synchronicity, measurable variables over immeasurable alignments of influence and confluence, geographic or temporal proximity, and immediate return over investing in foundational efforts, has not led social network marketing into the Shangrila of overflowing wealth.
Understanding the culture-shift of friendship from something best defined by what it meant to most people in the era before Web 2.0 to what it means now and what it will mean in the future is one step in the right direction. It isn't the only step, of course, but as with most things related to human society there are no easy answers or quick rewards.
Social networking certainly isn't without value, either to the big companies that dominate it, or to the marketers that utilize it. It's value, however, cannot realistically be assessed by trying to ascribe dollar signs to members and their relations; its value is more qualitative than quantitative, more an art than a science, more a new medium than a new way of being. El Dorado is, as always, more in the imagination than reality, and the few exceptions in the history of marketing that have fundamentally changed the game only prove the rule.
Friends are fine, but we've always had friends; if there is a revolution to be found in the social networks of today, it will be found not by the wholesale cultivation of lists of who we know, or who we don't know, but what we have and what we want or need to have.
If that part of the equation is known, then what remains to solve it is to determine who needs what we have, or has what we need, and how the haves and the needs flow, or can be made to flow, in multiple directions of time, space, and cyberspace through interactions between the different parties involved. Basic "Supply and Demand", in other words, but suitably modified in the context of online social engagement.
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