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Bourland Has Me Asking - How Do You Measure the Value of a Facebook Friend?

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Andy Bourland has a video on his blog about his recent Facebook Friends experience. (Don’t forget to subscribe.)

it’s all about how his experiment on getting a certain number of Facebook Friends is going, and his advice as he reached the last milestone. I applaud his efforts to expand his network on Facebook, it’s an important piece of the puzzle.

However, I’m more inclined to focus on quality, rather than quantity, for reasons I posted as comments to his post (not yet moderated at publication time).

That made me ask myself a question…. what is a Quality Friend on Facebook?

Of course, as Andy points out, Facebook Friends aren’t All necessarily friends, not in the American sense of the word.

They’re people you know. But Facebook calls them friends and I like to treat them that way until such a time that they prove me wrong - which I doubt will ever happen with 99% of the people I know there.

Keeping that in mind, a Quality Facebook Friend has the following attributes:

  1. They’re Active - they log in often enough for you to maintain a connection through Facebook, and they do interesting things when logged in.
  2. They’re Friendly - they may not all be your friends, but if you say hello/poke/message/write on their wall, they’ll eventually return the greeting in a fashion of their choosing.
  3. They’re Enigmas in the inspirational sense of the word - enough alike me that we have common ground, but different enough for me to be fascinated by what they do.

You’ll notice that i didn’t talk about what they could do for me. While it’s not 100% honest to say I don’t care, it’s about 80% true. I care more about what my Facebook Friends can expose me to, and what I can do for them, for two reasons.

First, if I base the relationship on the fun we could have together and what they can open my eyes about, it takes the pressure off me by feeding my need to be productive with other results. Second, if anything business-related comes out of us building a link to each other, the strength of that link will result in a better overall relationship.

And better business relationships mean better results for everyone.

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Posted by Tinu Abayomi-Paul on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 9:04 pm 
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  • Thanks Warren. The discussion of what value we have when we befriend someone is an excellent one, and upcoming-- I feel like it's a different discussion for a different mentality. I'd been waiting for someone whoe embodies that mentality to frame the discussion around besides Jeremiah - only becuse I talk about him so much. Stay tuned and thanks for coming by again!
  • Great question Tinu.

    But I'd re-frame it and ask

    "What is the value you can add by becoming someone's friend?"

    If you go in with this attitude, your ROI will skyrocket.

    I can see from your activity that you "get it".. As long as we seek to help others, we'll be the kind of freinds that attract greatness.

    See you on FB

    Warren Whitlock
    http://warrenwhitlock.com/facebook
  • Hey Andy,

    Yeah, I know what you mean about groups -- people keep making me officers of stuff which is fun... I meant are you not getting any group noticies at all (like such and such friend joined a new group), or just not getting notices when people reply to your discussion threads in forums?

    I might be getting more notifications because I fiddled with my notifications in my account settings. I also set my news feed preferences options to show me more stories about groups. There's one other thing I changed that made a difference that I can't recall off the top of my head.

    Thanks for the comment on the design. :) I still want a custom header, to make the site load a little faster and maybe put both columns on the right. But yes, this looks like the final cut at least for the next year or so.
  • Groups have forums

    Forums have discussion threads

    Who knows maybe I just haven't had any replies in the threads I replied in to receive a notification of some kind - I didn't take part in too many because I was worried about not being able to follow them.

    However I did comment on a video in a private group we are both a member of earlier, and I didn't get any notification of the reply that was posted.

    p.s. I like the new look, is this the final one?
  • Really? My conversations pop up in my news feeds. What discussions are harder to follow, maybe I haven't had them yet.
  • I haven't quite got into reciprocating pokes yet.

    My biggest problem with Facebook is the amount of clicks it takes to monitor any conversations you participate in. It is almost as if it is designed for flyby commenting.
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