Credit: Dan Morelle

If I deleted you from my Facebook, would you notice? What about if I stopped following you on Twitter?

And if you noticed, why would that be? Because you count your “friends” and followers closely? Or because you actually missed me?

We spend so much time “connected” to other “people,” but how deep do those relationships run?

So many of our online relationships are based on a single common interest. These relationships are different than many of the “organic” ones we form — the ones we form “out there” in the “real world.”

In the “real world,” our relationships start from a shared, common interest, but then they evolve.

As we share space with these people, we get to know them beyond our initial shared interests. They become humanized as our relationship with them grows deeper and more nuanced.

But our online relationships tend to stay compartmentalized.

We follow someone on Twitter because of what they tweet. We connect with them on LinkedIn because we do business and/or work in the same industry. And we might even add them on Facebook, but we’re mindful of what we share with them — of what we let them see.

Like a bunch of marketers, we try to keep these relationships targeted — we try to keep them focused.

But if they needed help in the “real world”, would we ever notice? If they needed help moving a couch, would we be there? How much do these relationships really mean to us? How much would we really miss them if they were gone?

If you read this blog, then this probably won’t interest you. But maybe you know someone who it will, so here it is.

Next week, June 15th, From 6-8:30pm, I’ll be giving a social media marketing workshop at Agence Ometz. The goal of this workshop is to demonstrate how people can use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to grow their professional networks, find business opportunities, and advance their careers.

The workshop costs $55 and will be broken down into four modules:

• Reputation Management: using social media to manage your online brand/reputation.
• Professional Profiles: codes of conduct for maintaining a professional online presence.
• Business Development: social networking to find business leads & career opportunities.
• Features & Functions: 1 hour tutorial on maximizing the networking potential of your different online profiles.

If you know anyone who you think might benefit from something like this, I’d appreciate you passing it on. Thanks…

It seems that Facebook might finally have a monetization plan. According to the Telegraph, Facebook demonstrated its new instant polling system at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site [...] will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

Even though the Facebook database will allow pollsters to target just the right demographics, I remain skeptical over how feasible the model is. Essentially, the Facebook platform is so optimal for interacting with your personal network, many users are loath to do anything else — such as pay attention to ads and then click on them. I think this is one of the reasons that so many advertisers on Facebook (many of them colleagues of mine) have reported such poor conversions on their Facebook ad campaigns. As the Telegraph story goes on to note:

Rival research company IDC said advertisers are turning their backs on social networking sites because they have a lower “click-through rate” than traditional online ads. Only 57pc of social network site users clicked on an advertisement and made a purchase last year, compared to 79pc on the internet at large.

Come to think of it, Facebook’s greatest opportunity might be in affiliate marketing as a super-affiliate. That is, instead of trying to monetize its database by letting third parties target Facebook users based on the desire of those third-parties, Facebook might consider leveraging that database to recommend products/services to those users that they might actually be interested in already.

For instance, Facebook might considering leveraging the Amazon and eBay APIs to “hyper-target” their users with product offers that coincide with what Facebook knows their interests to be. In fact, such a monetization model would be considerably less intrusive than current Facebook ads or this new polling system. After all, users would prefer seeing things that they are already interested in over being solicited by a random third-party that is interested in the demographic that a user belongs to.

[Hat-tip Nick Tadd]

A lot like high school,

there’s gossip, and graffiti

all over the walls.

I follow myself,

on Twitter, and Facebook and,

LinkedIn, and my blog.