Team Alpha 375

Strongest relationships built in person, not online

By Bob Strasser The hottest topic around the media circuit continues to be social media. Everyone is discussing it, using it, hating it, loving it or simply trying to figure it out. Many of my friends spend hours each day texting information to each other. It may be a mixture of business, family, sports talk and gossip, but digital text spills out from their smart phones daily. The social media craze is big and getting even bigger among all social strata in America. My family is no exception. My wife, for instance, is a good example of a smitten woman. She was curious about Facebook, but resistant to embrace the idea of putting her life online. She aggressively fought off the urge to sign up for a long time. She would say, “It’s a waste of time,” or “These people who constantly go on these sites have too much free time on their hands.” Her curiosity, however, eventually got the best of her. I showed her my Facebook page and told her about all my friends who were connected to me, and that was all it took. Now she regularly visits Facebook sites of relatives, friends and neighbors – nearly everyone she has never met. She is not the exception when it comes to how social media has overtaken our country. Even former computer-phobic types have finally begun Twittering on their phones and computers. Most don’t share anything close to earth-shaking news, but they find great satisfaction sending messages about the day-to-day affairs of their lives. Business, including The Business Ledger, is embracing social media, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Businesses who haven not hopped on the social media bandwagon are now viewed as behind times. Facebook traffic has grown exponentially since it launched in February 2004. As of last month, there were over 500 million users. The business community was a bit slower than the general public to embrace Facebook, but that has changed. You now see Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter logo links all over the Internet, and advertisers include mention of their social media involvement in magazines, newspapers, TV, on product packaging – you name it. What does this phenomenal growth really mean for how we, as business owners and managers, communicate with other businesses and our clients? With this explosion of social media, are we becoming more social beings? I ask my colleagues and friends this question occasionally and I usually just get blank stares. They say, “What do you mean?” I then say, “Think about it for a minute, are the benefits of Facebook and Twitter worth the time you expend?” More often than not I hear, “I guess so” or “Everyone is using it and I don’t want my business left out.” Despite the fact social media includes the word social, is it really social? Or, to put in another way, does using social media in business make us more connected to each other? Does this connection lead to stronger business relationships? Will social networking replace tried and true business networking? Research on what effect social media has on personal and business relationships is still in its infancy. I did find one study that said, “According to a group of researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Twitter is not a very social network. After analyzing over 41 million user profiles and 1.47 billion follower/following relationships, the researchers concluded that only 22 percent of all connections on Twitter are reciprocal. On Flickr, this number is closer to 68 percent, and on Yahoo 360 it’s 84 percent. The large majority (78 percent) of connections between users on Twitter are one-way relationships.” From my own business experience based on years in publishing, face-to-face encounters still generate the strongest feelings and loyalties among businesses. I occasionally hear about companies that discover each other through social media, but much more often it is the face-to-face experience that leads them to do business together.