Social Media: Quality vs. quantity

The other day I read an email from a friend and colleague who had written to me on LinkedIn asking for a favor.   The problem is that she had written me several weeks before I had read the email, and now the favor was a moot point.  The problem wasn't that I had just ignored her request, the problem was I didn't see it until it was weeks old.  I didn't see it because of the volume of message I get from LinkedIn has caused me to turn the volume way down on those messages.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that I am so popular or so important on LI that massive amounts of people send me messages to get my perspective or advice.  Rather, I have adopted the strategy of being what is called an Open Networker.  The philosophy of an Open Networker, as I understand it, is that no contact is a bad contact.  That the advantages of social media multiply if you accrue a larger network of contacts.  While I never got caught up in the arms race that some LI open networkers get in, trying to have the most connections, I also have not hesitated to accept link requests from people with little or no obvious connection to me.

I have had the belief that a larger network would serve me best by giving me a larger pool of references and a greater resource of opinions when I have posted a query.  While this proved true and useful when I was first using LI, as more of my "real" contacts have started using LI as a means of connection and communication, it appears to have become counterproductive.

So the question I pose to the blogosphere is this:  which is better, quantity or quality when it comes to connections in social media.  I realize that there are some differences between LI, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  I am interested in whether people have strong opinions, relevant experience, or a pithy comment or two regarding contacts in social media.  What are the advantages to open networking?  What are the disadvantages?  I will be posting a link to this blog on all my social media sites (LI, Twitter & Facebook)  I am hoping to be educated and enlightened by my open network!

Luddites

In an article in this month's Fast Company on Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University, there is a quote I quite like.  Davidson is a Duke English professor and co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) a "network of academics inspired by new technology..."

At the end of the article, Davidson, who is in her 50s, expresses frustration with some of her generation who are ignoring or resisting the new technologies and the new realities brought on by those technologies.

"When I hear from those 40-year-old, 50-year-old Luddites, I'm thinking, What else is wrong in your life that you have to make such a wall?  If you're worried about distraction, something else is going on."

Horizons

Good marketing is the building and nurturing of relationships.

Relationships are not built in one day or over one campaign or really on one issue.

A good marketer, therefore, should always keep an eye on the horizon, even while tackling the work of the day.

Acceptable losses

I had a boss once who talked about some customers who had a lot of complaints as "acceptable losses."  His feeling was that if the number wasn't too high, having some irreconcilable customers (or former customers) was just the cost of doing business.

My first instinct was, and is, to resist that philosophy.  Every customer is golden.  Every customer is worth fighting for.  The customer is always right.  I questioned, in my naivete, how my boss could be so cavalier about letting a valuable customer slip through our fingers when with more effort we probably could repair and save the relationship.

What I failed to realize at first was that my boss wasn't rejecting customer services altogether.  Actually, he was a strong proponent of it and a skilled practitioner.  Rather, his stance on "acceptable losses" was my first experience of Pareto's Law being put into practice.  You know Pareto, who told us that 20% of the customers cause 80% of the problems or, similarly, that 85 % of the profits come from 15% of the purchasers  and so on.  If you aren't familiar with Pareto and his principal, you can read more here.

What my boss was really doing was trying to get a team of relatively naive sales people to focus their finite customer service resources where they would do the most good, both for the company and for the morale of that relatively naive sales force!  There are customers, he would contend, that we would never satisfy, or only satisfy with herculean effort.  Better, he would suggest, to let those customers move on and take up the time and resources of someone else, perhaps our competitors. We should spend the same effort we would have spent satisfying one customer to satisfy 5 or 10 or 50 customers.

Seems like 20% of the bosses teach 80% of the lessons worth learning.

Day Moon

I still get a geeky, wonders-of-nature thrill when the moon is visible during the day.  A day moon is always unexpected (at least to me) and always gets me thinking about the astrophysics of it all.

Think about what you can do to provide geeky thrills and to capture the stream of thought of your customers and prospects by doing something unexpected and different.

Graduations

I have had the opportunity recently to attend a couple of high school graduations, including my daughter's.  The ceremonies are almost always similar with short (hopefully!) speeches reminiscent of the glorious four years just past or philosophical about the years coming up.  High School, at graduation ceremonies, is portrayed as a great incubator of young men and women; a soft-focus frolic through four years with crazy but lovable teachers and mischievous but lovable classmates.  Triumphs are remembered.  Defeats and failures are not.  Everyone leaves graduation feeling good about their their past and hopeful about their future.

I am convinced that graduation ceremonies are one of the reasons so many people generally remember their high school experience as positive.

Some business have seemingly picked up on the transformative power of a closing celebration.  There are car dealers who will take your picture and have the whole sales team applaud when you pick up your brand new car.  Realtors give you a housewarming present at the closing.  A few high end barbers offer a short neck and shoulder massage after your hair cut.  You get the idea.  They are all going for that same positive capstone experience as high school graduation.

I wonder what it would do for our customer relations if we had a "graduation" after every customer interaction.

Legacies

The recent death of an acquaintance got me to thinking...
A year after your death, what will people remember about you personally and professionally?

They won't remember:

• the deadlines you made
• the budgets you balanced
• the meetings you ran
• the desk you kept clean (or failed to)

I suspect (hope) they will remember

• the help you provided someone just starting out
• the time you made a difference 
• the kind of relationship you have with your family and friends
• the kindness you show to people who you will never see again
• the crazy ideas that you championed
• the value you created for your coworkers and customers
• the values you instilled in your children 
• the smiles that you created, through a sense of humor or an act of kindness
• the art you create, whether it is musical art, visual art, performance art, or simply the art of being there

I fear that they will remember

• not the mistakes that you made but the way you reacted to those mistakes
• the times you lost your temper, especially if it is with a subordinate, or a customer
• intolerance
• injustices
• injuries (physical or emotional) that you inflicted
• The amount that you focused on (worried about) the legacy you are leaving vs. the life you are living.

Everyone will leave a mixed legacy.  The trick to leaving a legacy your grandchildren will be proud of, it seems to me, is to live like you care about others, about causes, and about doing good things, more than you care about your legacy.