[Web Informant] 20 May 2009: When to defriend and defollow

[David Strom]

Web Informant, 20 May 2009: When to defriend and defollow

When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say
I wasn't one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High
rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are
now the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn't have reality shows where
beauties met their geeks, Bill Gates hadn't yet gone to, let alone
dropped out of college, and the Steves were still eating fruits rather
than making Macs. We didn't even have computers, phones still had
dials on them, and we all watched one of three network TV channels and
read newspapers that came in the afternoon. And all of our parents
bought American-made cars.

Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own
behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first
thought was to collect as many "friends" as I could, to grow my
network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email
address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.

I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and
they still aren't as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that
underdog feeling again) – I have seen the "feed" streams that are
produced from all these people just burying me in the details and
status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow
of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run
back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can
hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen
of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages
to.

Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people
to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free
burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby
establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That
is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a
couple of bucks, if not more.

I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on
the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks
are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon,
puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or
white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product
consulting. So I don't want to just spam you with needless updates
about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family
vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention
the books that I read in my last missive.

So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And
while I don't want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular
kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our
friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going
forward.

Over at Twitter (where my network is still "just" a few hundred
followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that
will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks.
This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as
their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the
signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.

I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you
that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which
is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I
deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social
networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and
get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a
customer.

Now, I don't have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am
glad that I don't have to deal with the hyper social strata that are
Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my
20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.