One on One Relationships or Mass Communication?

Ever tried to figure out how much time should be invested in building personal relationships on social networks ?

To quickly recap on some basics…

Social marketing really involves just two activities:

1. Personal interaction: building relationships through messages, writing on walls, emails etc

2. Content creation (and content sharing): notes, video, blog posts, photos, comments, etc

To get the maximum potential from social networking activity, you’ll need to build solid personal bonds with people at the same time leveraging the technology. This means allocating time wisely to making friend in addition to using mass communication strategies.

The basic idea with say, Facebook is that it acts like a content syndication platform to spread your message to thousands of potential friends, associates and prospects for your business…

The foundation for this is your personal relationships. If you haven’t built solid relationships and bonded with like minded people first it’s unlikely you’ll gain the same kind exposure as the person with many close friends within their “core group”.

Strategic Networking With a Core Group

It seems logical to think that even the most successful social networker/marketer can only ever really have a “core” group of friends. Although this core group may not be explicitly acknowledged or formalised it is in place nevertheless. (I’m using the term “group” loosely not to be confused with Facebook Groups)

This may consist 10 - 15 friends or may be be up 100 + ? They may have 5000 friends but it’s only really possible to maintain close relationships with a lesser number of friends.

For a more detailed discussion of how to go about building relationships with your core group check out Charles Heflin’s O.G.R.E.S relationship management formula.

My guess is the more time you have the bigger your core group might be?

My thinking is (or at least was)… even if you have plenty of time for building personal relationships, you should limit your time spent on one to one networking activity (maintaining freindships with your core group) and prioritize time for creating valuable content and sharing it with as many people as possible…

Content is king on social networks just the same as anywhere else on the web…

But how should you prioritize your time?

Well as they say success leaves clues…

What Does Gary Vaynerchuk Do ?

If you’re in any doubt about the importance of personal interaction, you only have to look at the success of Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV. Here’s a social media celebrity known for his phenomenol success in leveraging social networks…

This is what New Media Expo says about him

“Gary leveraged technology to reach an untapped audience for his brand and now attracts more than 60,000 viewers a day. Gary has taken his unscripted show and used it for massive self promotion by carefully marketing it via Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, Pownce, and other networking channels. As a result of these Web 2.0 tactics, Gary has been featured by Conan O’Brien, Ellen, Time Magazine, Nightline, The Wall Street Journal, and other national media outlets.”

I don’t know about you but I’d assume that someone like Gary would be so much in demand that he’d carefully filter his personal communication and have little time for replying to messages from “friends”.

Not so.

Despite his massive success, he still prioritizes huge chunks of time to answering personal messages and fostering one on one relationships.

In July’s edition of “Wired” magazine they featured a breakdown of his activities on one particular day…

It turns out he spent more time on one on one personal emails than he did sleeping!

Impressive commitment to personal interaction.

Here’s my paraphrasing of the article titled:

How to Build an Army of Followers

“Gary Veynerchuk, the excitable host of Wine Library TV, has become a cult figure to the 80,000 “Vayniacs” who routinely tune into his vlog.

How does he inspire such devotion?

Simple: By spending more than twice as much time responding to emails as he does sleeping.”

Here’s how Gary allocated his time on April 29th 2008

Responding to email: 12 hours 12 minutes

Sleeping: 4 hours 24 minutes

Taking meetings: 3 hours 1 minute

Commuting: 2 hours 29 minutes

Connecting via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, Viddler and WineLibrary.tv forums 1 hour 14 minutes

Reading blogs: 25 minutes

Eating: 24 minutes

Vlog production: 22 minutes.

Ok, so that’s just one 24 hour period…even so it’s a mammouth effort and a real “eye opener”…

Now spending 12 hours replying to personal emails wouldn’t make the most appealing pitch for “how to make a gazillion using the latest greatest secret web 2.0 tactics” which is probably why we don’t hear so much about this subject from Internet marketing guruland but maybe this is a more telling peek into the real secrets of success ?