Stop trying to make Facebook friends

There’s a very interesting piece over here by Michael Arrington about a new app on facebook.  It appears people are using the app to ‘friend-harvest’, which is not something you could publicly say without fear of prison until a few years ago.

As a PR Agency, Loop are reasonably active in the online space and sites such as Facebook are a healthy part of the mix.  But there are times when the idea of ‘friendship’ in the old fashioned sense is certainly ‘stretched’.  On behalf of clients we comment on other blogs and we network online on their behalf but we need to be very upfront about who we are.  Friendships online often need to be filed in a different box than offline friends. 

Consider linkedin for example (Paul’s here), some people have 1,000s and 1,000s of ‘business contacts’.  Have they done business with them all? Of course not – some use it as a rather public game of top trumps simply growing their network to feel hugely important while others appreciate that having a large network makes you more valuable to your true contacts (you become a personal recruitment consultancy).

To accept how ‘business contacts’ and ‘friends’ online work I think we need to re-work our thinking.  Either that, or we accept the flippant premise of this graph courtesy of The Plooptionary

Facebook 'friends'

Well hello again!