Spectrum of Online Friendship
Monday, April 13, 2009
Update: Part 2, responses to comments here.
"What is a friend?" This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to "best friendliness"? (as I called them on my Friend For Hire flyer PDF)
Last week I wrote about how online friendships are different from what we've traditionally called friendships. Digital technology has affected the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships, effectively enabling us to create fans who feel like friends.
I wasn't finished thinking about the nature of online friendship, though.
Click for full size image
Passive Interest
This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it's the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I'm interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. e.g. repeat visits, blog readers, fans, followers, etc.
Active Interest
This is when I care enough to let you know that I care (in a nice way, not in a stalker way ;). It's a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don't yet expect a response, we're just letting you know that we're listening. e.g. people who leave comments on your blog, wall comments, @replies on Twitter, etc.
Sharing
At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me (remember that we share content for social reasons). I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. e.g. social bookmarking, retweeting links, posting links and content to my own sites and profiles, etc.
Public Dialogue
This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. e.g. public @replies, referrals in a blog post, and references posted to our various sites and profiles, etc.
Private Dialogue
At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. e.g. exchanging email, TXT messages, IM, and direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
Advocacy
At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. It's too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, "This is important. It's worth my friends' time. And I'm willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out." e.g. same tools as Sharing, but different language; usually entails recommending the person or brand, and not just a specific piece of content
Investment
The brass ring of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognize or quantify. But it's the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." e.g. Your wins are my wins.
The last tier, Investment, became clear to me in the wake of well-wishes deservedly showered on David Armano after his announcement last Friday of his move to the Dachis Corporation. I was one of those well-wishers myself, and was genuinely proud and excited to hear about his new gig.
When I think about people (or brands, or people-brands) who have had success at moving their audience from one end of this spectrum to the other, Armano is one of the first examples that comes to mind. This is why he was able to raise over $15,000 in one night for a friend in trouble. And it's why thousands of people offered up congratulations when they heard he had taken this new job.
Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there's so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions.
Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow.
Caveats:
Translations: (OMG! Thank you so much!)
What would you add? What would you change? What did I miss? What's your advice on how to move from one end of the spectrum to the other? Love to get some comments on this one. Please pass it around.
"What is a friend?" This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to "best friendliness"? (as I called them on my Friend For Hire flyer PDF)
Last week I wrote about how online friendships are different from what we've traditionally called friendships. Digital technology has affected the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships, effectively enabling us to create fans who feel like friends.
I wasn't finished thinking about the nature of online friendship, though.
Passive Interest
This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it's the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I'm interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. e.g. repeat visits, blog readers, fans, followers, etc.
Active Interest
This is when I care enough to let you know that I care (in a nice way, not in a stalker way ;). It's a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don't yet expect a response, we're just letting you know that we're listening. e.g. people who leave comments on your blog, wall comments, @replies on Twitter, etc.
Sharing
At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me (remember that we share content for social reasons). I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. e.g. social bookmarking, retweeting links, posting links and content to my own sites and profiles, etc.
Public Dialogue
This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. e.g. public @replies, referrals in a blog post, and references posted to our various sites and profiles, etc.
Private Dialogue
At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. e.g. exchanging email, TXT messages, IM, and direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
Advocacy
At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. It's too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, "This is important. It's worth my friends' time. And I'm willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out." e.g. same tools as Sharing, but different language; usually entails recommending the person or brand, and not just a specific piece of content
Investment
The brass ring of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognize or quantify. But it's the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." e.g. Your wins are my wins.
The last tier, Investment, became clear to me in the wake of well-wishes deservedly showered on David Armano after his announcement last Friday of his move to the Dachis Corporation. I was one of those well-wishers myself, and was genuinely proud and excited to hear about his new gig.
When I think about people (or brands, or people-brands) who have had success at moving their audience from one end of this spectrum to the other, Armano is one of the first examples that comes to mind. This is why he was able to raise over $15,000 in one night for a friend in trouble. And it's why thousands of people offered up congratulations when they heard he had taken this new job.
Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there's so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions.
Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow.
Caveats:
- In the digital world, none of these behaviors, even dialogue, requires a reciprocal feeling of friendship on your part. I can be your friend without you being my friend.
- These phases are not absolute gateways. It is possible occasionally to skip over one action or another and to advance to the next phase.
Translations: (OMG! Thank you so much!)
What would you add? What would you change? What did I miss? What's your advice on how to move from one end of the spectrum to the other? Love to get some comments on this one. Please pass it around.
31 Comments:
Mike -
Nice post.
It's especially interesting when you start to map this schema against the real world, or against other, established patterns of human behavior:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
The fascinating thing for me is that the escalation of friends from one end of the spectrum to the other is conscious for brands and unconscious for most "normal" (?) people.
There was an interesting bit on Fresh Air a while ago where James Woods was talking about the pathology of charming people, and I think it might relate to the way a set of brands look upon their activities on these internets.
I wrote about it, here.
this is fantastic. i'd like to share this w/my agency tomorrow at our lunch 'n learn.
mike, what i started doing this year was to carry the online convo w/some of my ppl on twitter to either seesmic or a good 'ol fashioned phone call. i found that these opportunities further the sharing of ideas and i'm able to get more context out of it. (e.g. facial gestures, body language, inflection in voice and tonality) that one would not get words on a screen. i guess this would live in the "private dialogue" phase, yes?
solid post.
Brilliant post, particularly the diagram, which I'll definitely be sharing/recommending to various people to help them understand online friendship as opposed to offline...
This post has been removed by the author.
Really enjoyed this view - thank you very much. Two things strike: 1) what brands are measuring. Your diagram simply emphasises just how superficial the measures of success online are in general (2D traffic numbers). Finding ways of measuring relationships (type of, depth of, value of, etc) is a new challenge for brands and one that first relies on brands starting to listen to and talk with customers rather than still shouting at them.
Which brings me to 2) and I was reminded by Clay Parker Jones of some work that we've been doing at CDA using Maslow's pyramid to establish some ground rules for relationship development between brands and online users based around the principle of usefulness. http://www.slideshare.net/clareob/cda-pyramid-of-usefulness-140409
I think there's correlation between the progression of online friendship that you've so elegantly described here, and our musings around the mutual benefits of brands being usful.
I think that's a great list but there's no listing of the "negative" or reciprocal sides of things.
e.g. Brittany Spears has none of those types of interests in me
So I don't mean to imply that it's negative in a bad sense but rather there's a flip side to the coin. Nor is there simply one type of relationship, e.g. "Not interested".
Having that single dimension rules out discovering relationships, e.g. netflix or Amazon.
There needs to be something which can encapsulate relationships like;
"You don't know this person but you should"
"Occasionally you should check up on this person"
"Read a tweet now and again"
"Ignore this person completely"
"You're ignoring this person but they're actively attacking you".
"This is a person you've never heard of but your friends seem to like"
etc.
Otherwise we miss our ability to build collectively collaborative filters which grow organically.
You are talking very specifically about people who first contact one another via the internet. Research on this topic within communication and social psychology (my own included) shows pretty definitively that most "online friendship" is between people who know one another in other ways and communicate through multiple media. So much as I like what you've done here, I'd encourage you to be explicit about how you frame it so as not to contribute to the illusion that there are two kinds of relationship -- online ones and "real" ones (which I realize is far from your intent).
It's difficult to foster those invested relationships without having face to face interactions. While I do try to interact on a personal level online, it's not until you meet in person that you can often really get a sense of one another's personalities.
Interesting observations—I'm pretty sure I've gone through all of them. Did you consider location proximity in some of these steps? Is it easier or more difficult communicating online via different cities with people you've never met face to face?
Great stuff. Each of these has real-world analogs, but social media / social networking allows us to digitize, labels, measure and track them.
word
yeah mate - i like it - in some ways though it is analogous to a brand segmentation with segments moving from most involved to least in the category - right?
i'd like to find a way to add another axis - the nature of the relationship
kind of speak to that here:
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/regressive-expressions-or-please-dont-use-twitter-like-a-billboard.html
lovefaris
Great post! I have appreciated it a lot and I have added my value here:
http://www.simonelovati.com/en/2009/04/personal-branding-how-you-reach-a-friend-online.html
Loved the post Mike. I'm drawn to anything that attempts to place a structure or framework over the chaos, particularly as this so often seems lacking (& critically so, in some cases) from a marketing perspective.
Particularly liked the way you talked about behaviors, not just qualitative relationship factors.
From an 'old-fashioned' account planning perspective your framework reminded me strongly of the path to purchase or consumer journey models that I spent many hours crafting as a junior planner. I don't see as many of them now. I think there are a number of reasons why: one, planners are taught those skills as frequently as they once were; two, many planners lack numeracy skills, so when it comes to populating with data, they come unstuck; three, and most significantly, I think it's a way more complex media landscape than it was 10 years ago, and that makes this kind of exercise tricky.
Fantastic post Mike. Agree with so many of the comments above…hard to add much else. I think that we could all do with more thinking like this.
Wow, this is great Mike. So in-depth and thoughtful.
A while ago, I had created my own version of a “spectrum”, which I did as a tweet:
How Friends are Born: Stranger > follow > @ > DM > FB > Phone > Meet > Friend
Although not as in depth as yours, it certainly shares some of the same values: the public sharing of information, the moving to private conversations, the connecting across multiple platforms.
I had created this because I do try to have a conscious “process” for how I use Social Media. I was actually viewing it as my “sales cycle” – how do I get people to take the action I need them to take? To me that’s the only way I could ultimately prove ROI. :)
But it seemed to also work for making friends, so many I have made this way!
Anyway, my tweet certainly resonated with people on Twitter – it got RT’d to every continent 'cept Antartica, and every major city in the US.
Interestingly, I got to this blog post because someone I had met through Twitter (@conradlisco) is now, apparently, in the “advocacy” stage with me. Conrad knew this would be something I would care about and tweeted:
“Spectrum of online friendship from @mikearauz. http://bit.ly/1kcgtE (@lisahickey - you should connect)”
He knew because, through the process, we shared goals, we watch out for each other, we publicly support each other. Conrad knew of my interest in this area, so he made the extra effort to call out to me – in public, to his friends. (Thanks Conrad!)
And -- for the record, I don’t think you actually have to meet physically to get to the “investment” or “friend” phase. Nice, but not necessary.
Allsssoooo… I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I do tend to care about the success of other people’s ideas much earlier in the spectrum. Way before investment. I wonder if that’s at the moment that I add my own thoughts to them. Hmmm… But I do like the idea of the “investment” phase. The idea that *together* you have created something worthwhile.
This was a great post, and got me thinking again of how it all works. Thanks again Mike.
Would love to see this with a time axis. After all, our digital identities hang around for some time (I am sure there is one here somewhere of me with bad 80s hair).
Sometimes I think the relationships we begin to form are out-of-sync with reality and it takes some time for these to accelerate. And then of course, I wonder whether the online identity ever really catches up or whether it is only ever one status update behind.
Mike:
Great post. Good analysis of the process. However, there's nothing wrong with the first box or the the third. We don't want to move everyone to the investment stage. No different from real life, acquaintances, neighbors, common interests, friends, close friends. What social media allows us to do is take and give a lot more to a lot more people in different ways. I may appreciate and value the fact that you turned me on to this thinking and may or may not want to go all the way to investment (thought I will post a link to this piece to help you get to Number one on Google, for no other reason than it matters to you.) But if in fact our relationship were limited to the fact that today you taught me something and tomorrow I taught you something and our paths didn't cross again for six months, that's OK, too. The great thing about social media is that it allows us to express, share, be generous, feel included, be taken seriously, etc. to any degree that we want. Even more importantly it fosters relationships based on ideas and thinking and valued content as well as the people who create it.
Thanks. Hope you get to number 1.
(P.S. Gave a talk to Emerson College last night, where I concluded the students would likely want to follow my ideas on Twitter, but not have me show up as their friend on Facebook. Still a worthwhile relathionship.)
Great analysis. You've expressed this as a matter of degree (as a spectrum), but online friendship also differs in kind in radical ways. Josh Porter hit the nail on the head when he noted that online friendship via Twitter permits truly *asymmetrical* friendship relationships. And in fact, even substantively symmetrical relationships are rendered asymmetrical through technology (using Tweetdeck to ignore 90% of the people you ostensibly folloow, as many popular Twitterers do, or using Facebook's many methods of "fake friending" people by ignoring them.
Mike:
Great post. Good analysis of the process. However, there's nothing wrong with the first box or the the third. We don't want to move everyone to the investment stage. No different from real life, acquaintances, neighbors, common interests, friends, close friends. What social media allows us to do is take and give a lot more to a lot more people in different ways. I may appreciate and value the fact that you turned me on to this thinking and may or may not want to go all the way to investment (thought I will post a link to this piece to help you get to Number one on Google, for no other reason than it matters to you.) But if in fact our relationship were limited to the fact that today you taught me something and tomorrow I taught you something and our paths didn't cross again for six months, that's OK, too. The great thing about social media is that it allows us to express, share, be generous, feel included, be taken seriously, etc. to any degree that we want. Even more importantly it fosters relationships based on ideas and thinking and valued content as well as the people who create it.
Thanks. Hope you get to number 1.
(P.S. Gave a talk to Emerson College last night, where I concluded the students would likely want to follow my ideas on Twitter, but not have me show up as their friend on Facebook. Still a worthwhile relathionship.)
Hello.
Very nice post.
I did a translation in french here:http://www.numerimatch.com/revue-web/facebook-twitter-etc-reseau-damis-ou-amis-du-reseau/11419
... with credits and backlink of course.
You, Sir, lack FriendFeed.
This is a good break-down of how relationships CAN develop in a digital setting. However, is there no value at all if they don't progress to the investment stage? Like your 1st caveat, sometimes we might mistake chosen engagement for lack of investment: http://www.openthedialogue.com/2009/03/distributed-audiences/
Interesting post Mike.
There's definitely a case for distinguishing between personal and professional friends online, as Nancy says above.
But I think this distinction can be made in the platform used. E.g. I might positively advocate a friend on Twitter, but take the p*ss out of them on Facebook. For me, each platform has its own set of social rules.
Thanks for the insightful comment you left on my blog post. The usefulness of people's opinions and interests can definitely be leveraged as a way of navigating the spectrum.
Fantastic post and a great definition of online friendships.
I am willing to translate it into Hebrew if you like, but since my blog is in English I have no place to publish it. So if you would like to have it as a document file for download just mail me...
i think this is brilliant. i'm so glad i found this...
i'm a HR lady/corporate recruiter and evangelist for using social media to build talent communities and recruit. one of the things that's tough for people breaking into using social media to recruit is how you actually build relationships with potential candidates or people for your talent community. this is an excellent illustration. i always tell people... if i met my last boyfriend because of twitter and a relationship came of that, you can find talent on social media and build relationships that way too!
good stuff. appreciate it greatly!
Online dating is now very popular. Yes I know there are millions of dating sites and that poses a problem. Type in ‘dating site reviews’ in Google. There are (thankfully) pretty nifty review site.that make that task pretty easy now as some of you already know. When you sign up to a few (yes a few) make sure you give an honest profile.
I think this is one of the first, full descriptions of this evolution of online friendships. I've heard about this type of stuff before but in bits and pieces. And it some ways it parallels Jeremiah Owyang "Future of Social Web" spectrum.
this online society makes me think that we beggin to act like bees in a global honeycomb.
great post!
kisses from brasil :D
Very nice post.. thank you
Interesting, but the spectrum doesn't cover negative online friendships, which is likely where a friendship goes after it's at the end of the spectrum.
I've had what I thought was a close online friendship for 5 years--this friend has a similar competitive online business to mine. We've exchanged several emails daily, sharing everything that's going on in our lives, the good and bad. But lately, she has become increasingly "competitive," imitating my work. And sometimes her actions are hurtful--like the time I sent her some photos of my beloved dog and she didn't bother to comment, or the time I emailed her about a painful medical procedure that I was having complications with, and she didn't reply. And she was rude after I sent her a gift in the mail, never thanking me for it; even worse, the gift was something that was personally meaningful to me and something I wanted to share with her.
I'm actually thinking of breaking the friendship off.
I've had enough.
Truly, online friendships can cause as much pain or joy as offline friendships. Like offline relationships, online friends also have certain expectations of each other, and when those expectations aren't met, the friendship begins to fall apart.
This is a great piece of thinking.
I've taken some of Faris and Simone's comments and developed a diagram with additional information such as the volume of relationship types, weaker connections that exist before both parties are mutually aware of each other and even the general timeline phases of the nature of the relationships.
If you can forgive the linkspam it is here:
http://davidjcarr.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/spectrum-of-online-relationships-diagram/
http://davidjcarr.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/spectrum-of-online-relationships-diagram
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