Friendonomics

WIRED contributor Scott Brown has written an interesting editorial about the implications of the current state of  what he terms “friendonomics” in the Facebook era. While the article is intended as a tongue in cheek observation on the absurd tendency of people to hoard their social contacts until they lose all meaning, there are some serious lessons to be learned from it for those of us who are currently trying to garner a following for our various endeavors, be they bands, blogs, or personal.

We are all well aware of the MySpace “friending” scams that bands employ to artificially make themselves seem more popular than they actually are, and the Facebook was meant to be antithetical to this, presenting the user with highly structured and scalable social circles which could be expanded and contracted however the user chose. This was supposed to create an environment where meaningful relationships that had some basis in the real world were the rule rather than the exception, and, for a while at least, this was certainly the case.

But now that Facebook has expanded to include anybody and their favorite company, I would suggest that this environment of genuine social connection has been violated and that we as individuals have become no different from the bands I previously mentioned. How many of us accept friend requests from people we barely know? What percentage of our friend group do we interact with on even a monthly basis? What is the real meaning of the majority of these friend connections in terms of our real lives? For the vast majority, myself included, the differentiating factor between the Facebook and Myspace has been largely rendered meaningless by our focus on quantity over quality.

Those of us who are looking to use Facebook as a marketing tool should seriously consider this question of meaning and explore options for how to make our brands relevant. There is little point of building a group of followers on this platform (or any other for that matter) who will only pay enough attention  to our band/blog/business’s friend requests long enough to hit the ‘accept’ button. It is better to maintain one active connection than hoard a dozen meaningless ones for the sake of having an impressive list. To pretend anything else will be to the detriment of what you are trying to achieve in the long run.