The superficial friending of everyone is pointless – the truth in this video released more than a year ago still rings true. If you have a million “friends” but no one really has your back – what’s the point!
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You know Brad, initially, I thought that Social networking was all about adding friends and followers. After seeing reading some tweets from you about dropping people you really didn't have interaction with or know, I decided to start doing the same. However, I also decided to get to know people in my current network and also engage others of like mind in groups by making comments or starting dialogue with others through comments in such a group. By doing this I'm adding a friend or follower here and there but they are people I have an ongoing relationship that I building. I then realized I've been trying to do the same thing in building a youth group at our small church here in Houston. Now I seek to spend time more one on one with youth and as I get in their "inner circle" and I have trust with them, they then begin to promote our group to their friends and bring their friends around on certain activity nights. Before I'd do a special event and pour hundreds into getting lots of people there and then, inevitably it always was to no avail.
I knew that it was all about connection – but over time I'd just follow people, just because they were following me. With my first round of unfollows, I learned that I had absolutely no connection with them – the relationship was totally meaningless. Most of them automatically unfollowed me.
I'd fully suggest that you check out Seth's book Tribes and be sure that you check out this video (it's long but very well worth it!) http://blip.tv/file/1409474/
It's like Zig Ziglar said.. "You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want."
That's one of my favorite quotes from Zig! And it's exactly on point — take a look at Gary Vee's ideas on the Thank you Economy! (it's the same thing)
Hey Brad, You know that it all boils down to one thing, it's not the quantity that does it, but the quality that keeps the juices flowing. If you tried to have a conversation with a cardboard box, you would be likely to get more response than you would from probably 60% of your 'autofollowers' from FB or any other Social networking site.
When you get a real conversation going, you can start to get the creative juices flowing and ideas start springing to life. Sometimes you just have to be able to chat and write down your thoughts at the same time!
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