Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque recently wrote a blog post arguing that relationships in social media are “thin relationships.” He writes,
“During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.”
The blogosphere tends to focus on the relationships that flourish on social media, so I appreciate that Haque chooses to focus on the flipside of the issue. I imagine he’s being purposely incendiary, and he’s right in some respects, but I think this line of thinking fundamentally misunderstands what social media is, and the role it plays in people’s lives. Social media’s greatest asset isn’t that it strengthens the core relationships in your life. It can, but it’s greatest contribution is that it makes it much, much easier to stay in contact with all those people/businesses/musicians/causes etc. in your life that you are interested in, but wouldn’t actively seek out on a frequent basis.
The culture is a bit different in various networks, but I’ll focus on Facebook, as it has come to define social media for most Americans. My Facebook friendships include hundreds of people I met in high school, college and the years I spent living abroad that I would never bother keeping in touch with if Facebook didn’t make it so easy. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like them. The strength of my relationships with these people certainly aren’t as strong as my core group of friends. However, largely because of social media, these relationships remain intact. We could get in touch with each other if we wanted to. There isn’t a certain level of “friendship points” available in my brain, and having these people remain on the periphery of my life doesn’t degrade the strength of my other relationships. The more the merrier.
Are these people “friends” in the traditional sense? Probably not, and I think part of the confusion on how to define relationships in social media, be they between people or brands, is an issue of semantics. When a 16-year-old talks about their Facebook “friends,” they aren’t using the word the same way that a 16-year-old in 1995 used the word. It means that you’ve opted in to the possibility of being in contact with them, not that you would pick them up after their car broke down at 3 AM twenty miles away. You’ve shown some interest, at some point. Does becoming a fan of Pepsi or Ford mean that those brands are necessarily a core aspect of your identity, that you’d plant yourself in the way of an angry mob to defend them? No, of course not. Many of these relationships are weak, but if it wasn’t for social media, they wouldn’t be there at all.
Opting in to someone’s friendship or a brand’s fan page leaves the door open for growth. Maybe you’ll breeze over their entries in your newstream, or even create a Facebook list called “real friends” that filters them out. But maybe a post they make will spur you to reconnect with them. If you feel strongly that you’d like to get in touch, you can. And if your brand understands how to develop, and deepen relationships with its fans, it can. Because of social media, the possibility is there.
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