Stop Counting Your Friends
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 8:28AM
Quick: how many friends do you have in real life?
If you were able to quickly answer that question, the response was probably "none." (If so, please close your browser now, get up from your desk and go interact with a real, live human.) We don't keep an exact count of how many real life friends we have because the number itself is irrelevant.
How many friends do you have on Facebook (or connections on LinkedIn or followers on Twitter)?
The number is just as irrelevant in social networks, yet many people who would never tally their real life friends become obsessed with how many friends/followers/connections they have in their social networks. This is particularly rampant among those who view social networking exclusively as a marketing outlet, and it is killing what is great about social networking -- namely, that it allows us to make new friends (or reconnect with old ones) without regard to distance or time zone.
This social networking number fixation is a natural, if unhelpful, consequence of the various networking sites prominently displaying a user's number of contacts like a sports score. We equate displaying more friends with winning and the problem starts when we prioritize the number of our contacts over the quality of the relationship we have with our contacts.
Prizing quantity over quality is antithetical to the entire undertaking of networking. Strong networks do not exist to burnish the ego of one person; strong networks exist for the mutual benefit of all the network members. Believing that having thousands of LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers is the same as having a strong network is hallucinatory at best and self-destructive at worst. Make your contacts feel like a number and they will surely respond by acting like one.
The measure of network is not in the number of members, but in the amount of benefit its members derive from membership. First, tend to the contacts already in your network, and then add to your network sustainably and organically.
In building a law practice, it's a lot less important to count your contacts than it is to be able to count on them.
Social Networking in Marketing, Technology 
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Reader Comments (2)
Second post I've read on this blog and second post with which I've really agreed. Social networking is an easy fad CNN story, but I have yet to understand how a solo or small firm can really put it into practice. I have two groups of people who are my "friends" on Facebook: my actual friends and people whose names I recognize but don't really know. The latter group is not going to refer their friends' serious legal issues to me.
In my experience as a sports blogger, the primary use for Twitter is to alert colleagues to new and interesting news stories. No one has convinced me yet that it can be applied usefully to attract new clients. If your existing clients follow you on Twitter, what message are you sending by routinely updating? It seems to me that one's work speaks for itself and serves to generate the bulk of referrals. A trail indicating constant attention to Twitter might as well be a log of the times of day you did not have sufficient paying work but were still anchored to a computer.
Those are good points. The lawyers I know who say they have productively used Twitter as a business generation tool is through the cultivation of referral sources, particularly those in different parts of the country, rather than the cultivation of a direct client readership.
I agree with you on the Facebook issue -- social networking (or any networking, for that matter) only works if you build and maintain genuine relationships. Your actual friends will, of course, send you referrals, so I guess the question is "does Facebook provide a useful platform for extending your base of actual friends?'
The answer for me is maybe -- but I'm old.
:)