The more I think about what some people are doing wrong with social media, the more it occurs to me what other people are doing right, and how it can be emulated. I’m also realizing that I’m assuming that people know how to relate to each other, but that’s not necessarily true either.

Think about it – often, not always but quite a bit, people are congregating online to avoid offline encounter. It’s not always because they are shy or anti-social. Sometimes being online is more efficient than, say, having ten people fly out or conference call for a meeting.

Allan Cockerill started discussing what he says is the central issue to social media interactions:

These are social networking sites that we are talking about, and networking means relationship!.

If I don’t know you, why should I bookmark something for you?

And if we are friends in the online sense of the word, a string of links via instant message isn’t a friendship, it’s a dictatorship!

I would agree. You really have to think about what builds a relationship when you’re entering into these interactions, because if you enter into real connections with people, in the long run, this is what will work in your favor the most.

The difficult piece of the puzzle is two-fold.

1- We all have our idea about  the acceptable parameters of relating, on or offline, and,

2- Some elements of even a casual relationship akin to friendship are more difficult to imitate in an online-only connection.

Even if you don’t feel  that an ongoing link with another person in the online world is a friendship, by definition it is a type of relationship. The key to building better social media relationships then, is in remembering how certain types of casual relationships are formed, duplicating that in a suitable way online, and then show how they continue.

And we’ll ponder that next.