What Does “Relationship” Mean In a World of Social Media?

relationships and social media
With thousands of social media friends and followers, what does “connection” mean?

We have to change our understanding of connection when we have relationships with thousands of people through social media.

Some interesting revelations emanated in the comments that resulted from a recent post about Bootup Labs.

There was the antipathy to Bootup itself, to founder Danny Robinson, and to the concept of accelerators and incubators in general, basically revolving around the value or validity of the models.

I can’t say much about the latter, because I wasn’t writing about the value of the accelerator model. That’s a whole other discussion. I was writing about how someone in a business screwed up and took steps to do something about it.

However, one thing that jumped out at me was a belief expressed by a few people (or maybe one frequent anonymous poster) that my post somehow involved a kind of conspiracy of friends. I pulled my punches, said the poster, because I was “connected” with many of the people involved.

This theory had it that because I once publicly interviewed Steve Wandler and recently wrote an article on Leonard Brody, both of whom are on Robinson’s Bootup board, I therefore, in the words of the poster, supported, protected, promoted or flattered these people.

This could, of course, be a simple conspiracy theory hatched to justify the poster’s obvious antipathy to the Bootup accelerator concept. Conspiracy theories about just about any subject abound today, especially if you disagree with the people you believe to be conspiring.

But the comments did reveal a strong misconception about what “connection” means in the modern world. Today we are all connected much more than we used to be. But does that mean we have a lot of the kind of friends with whom we might form a conspiracy? I don’t think so.

I have met Steve Wandler exactly once – regarding that public interview – although we have talked on the phone several times. I have known Leonard Brody for years – we worked together on one of his books – so there’s a closer connection. I guess we’re in that almost-friends category. I met Danny Robinson briefly a couple of times while talking with someone else, know many of the people he knows, and once interviewed him on the phone.

Oh yeah, and all of us are LinkedIn connections.

For some reason, the poster felt these relationships should have been disclosed in the blog post because it implies we’re all buddies.

I wonder where this person is living today. We’re in a social media world where people have hundreds, if not thousands, of “friends” on Facebook, hundreds of business “connections” on Linkedin, and thousands of “followers” on Twitter.  Even the most avid social media haters probably have hundreds of correspondents on their email lists.

With all this connection going on, we’re obviously going to have to rewrite our understanding of relationships.

Many of us have already done so, mentally separating connections into close friends, workmates, acquaintances, occasional discussion companions, etc.

But clearly, some still have a long way to go.