What is the meaning of a “friend” in social media?

We know who our friends are in real life… Has the Internet changed the definition or terms of friendship?

We create friends in the offline world because we have things in common. You scratch my back, I scratch yours… We feed each others interests… It’s never discussed, it’s just what friends do.

The same should apply to online friends… You share something in common, feed the interest, share, comment and reward your online friends so that the connection goes a little deeper and you are granted mind-share from the other party becuase you “scratched their back”… The unspoken law.

Mind-share is what we are all after in our online endeavors… Always remember, when someone gives you their attention (mind-share) then you have increased your reach. Reach is never determined by the size of your friends list, it is determined by how many are paying attention.

Does your social media strategy include a system for ensuring quality or is this a numbers game for you?

Here’s a formula or law of engagement that fosters quality, breeds trust, builds authority and enacts the law of reciprocity among those you network with. As in the offline world, the mechanics of online friendship abide by the same unspoken laws…

I call it the O.G.R.E.S. relationship management formula

O = OBSERVE

Staying on top of your industry by reading the top bloggers’ blogs is a way of observing. You are staying connected with the top of your game. You know where and how to find bleeding-edge information that will be timely and well received by your target audience.

I will cover ways to observe in another post but for now I just want the point to be clear. Without observing (listening) then you will not be able to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.

G = GATHER

Based on what you observe you can now gather good information into your social communities. An example would be writing a blog post about what you observed. Another example would be bookmarking the observation. Another would be sharing a link to the observation.

R = REWARD

It is rewarding to the blog owner that you gathered their information into a blog post and expanded on it or repurposed it for your audience. You linked back to the originating post and the blog owner received a trackback notification. This notification tells them that someone just linked to their content. They will probably follow the link and read what you wrote. This is rewarding to the blog owner becuase you recognized (rewarded) their effort. Now you have branded yourself in their mind… good for future relations.

Rewarding is a way to get “noticed” by the community amidst a sea of noise. Rewarding is how you rise above the noise and the chatter to become a player in your industry. Recognizing and rewarding others for what they do is the only way to establish meaningful and powerful relationships in social media.

Reward people by telling them happy birthday… Reward people by commenting on their latest photo… Reward people by commenting on their blog posts. Doing this will build a community that will aggregate / syndicate your content to the far reaches of the web… It’s the unspoken undercurrent of “real” relationships.

Breaking it down this way is a little blunt but it really is the undercurrent of all relationships even though we don’t talk about it.

E = ENGAGE

Engage your community with information that you have gathered. When you find something interesting, create an entire content strategy out of it… Engage the people that you know are interested and be sure to reward them for their interaction.

Engaging fosters two-way communication. Without two-way communication, the social web would not exist. You can engage through social networks, audio, video, text, email, SMS texting … you name it, if you can two-way communicate with it, you can engage with it.

S = SEEK

Seek people that also Observe, Gather, Reward and Engage. By doing this you will ensure that you are building a powerful and active community. These will be your aggregators, they will share your content across the social web becuase you have done the same for them.

The power of your aggregators, your “true” online friends, compounds over time… It gets stronger and stronger… It is a true asset… Work that does not have to be repeated. Your true online friends will cause your search engine visibility and resulting traffic to surge becuase they follow this same formula… They reward becuase you reward… It’s pure, unspoken, human nature.

Your friends will put your material in front of your target audinence through many different channels bringing you traffic, action and sales. They’ll Digg it, Mixx it, Plurk it, Feed it, Tweet it, Blog it, share it, you name it.

This is how you increae your “reach”… This is how you build authority on the Web.

Continuing to work this formula will continue to build your authority over time. Chris Brogan recently asked his community how they would define authority on the Web.

I define authority by the amount of mind-share you have which is fostered by the number of real connections you have. This post is how I define it and act on it… How do you define/build authority on the Web?

Are you building relationships of value (breeding authority) or are you building a “friends list”?

…

This has been part 6 of a multi-part series on using social media effectively to build a “real” business online. Here are the previous 5 posts that have led to this one.

1. Is there any return on investment in social media?
2. Why does ROI in social media suck?
3. Why Traffic from social networks does not convert
4. I spotted Bigfoot on your website doing social media
5. The social media bubble that wasted your time

This post is a continuation of a series that I am doing on gaining a return on effort and money spent in social media (ROI). In the last post in this series I had made the following statement:

The level of success in social media (as determined by ROI) is directly proportional to the speed at which you gain trust among your audience, the social nature of your products/services, and the nature of your social network traffic conversion funnel (sales funnel). Don’t confuse a social network traffic conversion funnel with traditional Internet marketing tactics.

Now let me elaborate on that statement a little bit…

For example, if you spend 1 man hour in social networks to gain 1 newsletter subscriber then obviously your return on time investment is not worth the effort. You need to re-think your strategy because nobody is paying attention to you. How much is a new subscriber worth to you? $1, $2, $5, $100?

If your newsletter subscribers are worth $1 each then 1 hour of time to gain 1 new subscriber is not efficient unless your time is valued at $1 per hour… Right?

It seems that many people are mistakenly making this assessment of their social media effort without looking at the bigger picture and these same people are spreading the message that social networking is “not worth the effort”.

It is easy to see how this assessment could be made but this false assessment fails to include a crucial element I call the “compounding of community”. To use an analogy let’s say that you have opened up a new bank account that offers a 10% daily return on money you have on deposit. Now let’s suppose that you deposit $1. The $1 represents one friend, follower, contact, etc. that you have gained in a single social network.

Now in order to earn your 10% daily return you need to communicate with your new friend and work to “deepen” the relationship by commenting on or contributing to something that is very personal to them such as:

• Content they wrote (most favored)
• A picture they posted
• An upcoming birthday
• Anything personal created by the friend or personal to the friend

Now, according to the law of reciprocity, that friend owes you the same favor in return. This is how you gain your interest on the $1. This is the “unwritten law” … In networks like Digg where diggs are not so much granted by the nature of the content submitted, they are granted because of the law of reciprocity. Power Digg users understand this law and use it to get their stories dugg to the front page. Content is a secondary consideration… relationships are primary. These relationships multiplied by hundreds or thousands is where success in social media is derived. The law of reciprocity = interest in the social media bank.

I understand that not everyone will reciprocate, some are very busy, some are very egotistical, some just don’t care… This is human nature so you have to consider that the interest you gain on your “friend in the bank” ($1) is not going to be 100% … more like 10%. Of course it is impossible to reciprocate in this manner with everyone that becomes a friend or follower, that is another reason why the return is not 100%.

What is the value of compounding of community through the law of reciprocity?

• You build and foster strong relationships and “true fans”… this is a true asset.
• You empower your friends and followers to crowdsource your content through the law of reciprocity.
• Reciprocity gives you powerful search engine visibility giving you an increase in search engine traffic with every blog post you make (or web page you publish). This happens because others bookmarking and sharing your content increases “NATURAL” incoming links to your content.
• Reciprocity gives you more than one listing in the search engines for your keywords/phrases because your content is referenced from more than one place because it was submitted by more than one person to multiple locations.
• Reciprocity gives you direct and targeted traffic from the friends and followers of others becuase your content appears in places submitted by your friends.
• Reciprocity gives you positive votes in the eyes of powerful people with whom you have reciprocated in the past. This is a strong case for adding valuable comments to the blogs of those who already have a large following. This is a strong case for linking to others’ blogs from your blog posts so they will see what you have to say and return the favor at some point without your asking.

The law of reciprocity is the basis of all friendships and trust. It is how you network like Paul Revere and Quincy Jones. If someone links to your blog post, don’t you always look to see what they wrote? Do you not feel a very human obligation to return that favor at some point down the road if not immediately?

Do you not “remember” that person? Have they not branded themselves in your mind?

The point is to acknowledge the friends/followers which speeds up the process of gaining trust. By commenting on the friends content (or any other personal item), the law of reciprocity will cause the friend to feel an obligation to return the favor. This is how you gain more comments on your content. This is how you get others to bookmark it, share it, digg it, link to it, etc., etc., etc. This is how you build a following of people that trust you. This is how you accelerate the process of gaining trust. This is how you brand your name and image (avatar) in the mind of your community and make it synonymous with quality. This is how you build community.

It takes time to build a community of trusting friends, followers, contacts, acquaintances, etc. Before you can expect a favorable return on your social media investment, you have have to build your communities in this manner.

To use an analogy, you can’t expect a new home to protect you from the rain until the roof is built. In a similar manner you can’t expect a return on your social media effort until your communities are built. In this respect, you can’t gauge the effectiveness of your social media effort without first building the foundation.

Going back to my original statement…

The level of success in social media (as determined by ROI) is directly proportional to the speed at which you gain trust among your audience.

Element 1: The law of reciprocity is the tool that aids in “speeding up” the gaining of trust.

Also part of this statement is Element 2…

The level of success in social media (as determined by ROI) is also tied to the social nature of your products/services, and the nature of your social network traffic conversion funnel (sales funnel).

These two points are the subject of the next post in this series. I invite comments and questions to help clarify the point of this post.

What is your take?

I am testing a Worpress plugin that sends the title of my blog posts and a link to the blog post to my Ping.fm account. If this works successfully then I have completely automated the aggregation/syndication of my blog posts to my social channels.

I will let you know how it pans out.

<< UPDATE>>

The test worked great. This successfully automates me updating 13 of my networks whenever I make a new blog post here. If you run a hosted Wordpress blog and you are not aggregating your content across multiple networks AND building community in those networks then you are limiting your reach.