Social Media Principle #1 – Associations are Inherently Good

This post is first in a series of my Social Media Princples.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.

Divide and conquer was Julius Caesar's great military strategy.  It has been used time and again. When people are separated and cannot communicate, they cannot achieve their existing goals or formulate new ones.  It’s very effective.

Social media teaches us that our associations make us stronger.  The number of followers we have on Twitter, the number of friends on facebook, the number of connections on LinkedIn all increase our “reach”. 

“Reach” is a somewhat fluid term but basically means the number of people who read or impacted by your message.  You can have five friends at dinner, tell them something, if three of them repeat it to 2 friends each, and 5 of those people say it to one, you have an effective reach of 16 people.  The more people in your network, the larger your reach.

Social Media tools help us to manage our associations.  Sometimes well, sometimes not so well.  The effectiveness or ineffectiveness of those tools are independent of the principle.  Your strategy of managing a network in a particular tool is likewise independent.

Associations in and of themselves increase our reach which, in turn, increases our potential opportunities.

Technorati Tags: Jim Benson,10 social media principles,social media,reach,julius caesar,linkedin,facebook,twitter

Written at Groundwork Coffee, Los Angeles, CA

Comments

[Neil]

The problem with LinkedIn is that when you accept a connection request, you'll often find your news feed - the most important part of the experience - is flooded with updates about the new connection. They may be interested in you, and you don't want to rudely deny a connection request to someone, but that doesn't mean you want this connection to augment the results of your home page. By accepting the request, you get a greater reach, but you also get more noise. Have you ever noticed this, Jim?

[Jim Benson]

Neil,

Absolutely, and this is a tool problem. It's also one of the reasons I'm doing these principles.

Right now tools like LinkedIn get their valuation by hoarding the important parts of your information (the network itself) and then broadcasting the less important bits (new connections [temporal and untrackable], and status updates.)

Their ultimate goal is to provide you with the features that they can provide at the least cost both in terms of provision and imagination.

LinkedIn could be the world's most effective business tool ever - but it chooses not to be by intentionally limiting how you can access the important information - your actual network.

All social media tools are currently guilty of this.