Social Networks and Relationships
why relationships matter
Every time you read something related to social media, you will read about relationships. On Facebook you can only invite your “friends”. LinkedIn won’t let you connect with people you don’t 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 in which he criticized people on Twitter for trying to “sell” you on their products before they even met you. He went so far as to say that he doesn’t follow anyone who has an autoresponder Tweet; every time someone follows you, a thank you auto-response comes out. His main concern was not the automated response, but the additional request to click through to the stranger’s website or try their new product or service. “How do you know I want your service if you don’t know me?” he asked him.
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” those autoresponders. Some, like me, didn’t realize this wasn’t proper “network etiquette” on Twitter. Some, like me, had to go back and review our autoresponders to remove any offending links. All this leads me to think about the importance of the relationship in social networks.
Clara Shih on the Facebook Era tells us that most people on social networking sites have very few strong contacts. In fact, most people on Facebook have only 10-20 solid connections, even if they have 200 or more friends. LinkedIn used to require you to actually know the person as a colleague: have 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 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 the active use of those weak connections and the good use of strong connections that relationships are formed. Let’s take a look at one of the reasons why relationships are important.
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 we know about ourselves that we are willing to share with others. Examples of these kinds of things might be our love of 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 people who interact through social networks use blogs to share information about themselves. All blog manuals tell us that blogs evolved from the concept of web-log. In other words, it’s like a diary on the web. It is your web diary. If you just 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 includes 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 don’t 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. All of us 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 love and trust him.” Being curious as a child allows you to open up to your Blind Area and gain the trust of others. Listening to what others say allows you to discover your blind spots. When people slap you for being too authoritative on your blog or too cool on Facebook, pay attention; they may be discovering something about you that you didn’t know. Social networks allow us to learn what others think of us, good or bad.
Quadrant 3: The Hidden Area The 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 to us is to break down our walls and allow others to see who we really are. Social media allows us to expose ourselves for scrutiny. When we post a blog and share it with our Facebook friends, we tell them something about ourselves that we might not say face-to-face. When we find a cute little quote that we post for our Twitter followers, we let them know something about us that they may not know. Who are the people you share your Hidden Area stuff with? People you trust. Once you trust your friends on Facebook or your followers on Twitter, you begin to build a relationship. Someone once said, “Information is like sand. The more you try to hold on to it, the more it slips out of your hands.”
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 about. These things are left undiscovered until we unleash our creativity. Luft and Ingham tell us that once we listen to others and openly share, in other words, 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 over and over again that the challenge of social media is not what tool to use, but to discover ways to speak and listen to the mainstream.
Talking and listening creates a very large Open Area that helps us to be authentic and transparent. Authenticity and transparency create trust. And trust, by the way, creates relationships. That’s why we strive for relationships. Probably the most successful female artist of our time, Oprah delivered her commencement address at Wellesley College in 1997. Some call this the best speech of her kind. Why? “Authenticity oozes from every paragraph of this speech,” Richard Green said in an interview with USA Weekend. The power of opening works not only for Oprah at commencement speeches, but it can work for you if you’re willing to tear down walls and welcome in crowds.