I've been culling my social network connections again recently. Oh, not in any kind of snooty or draconian way. It's simply a routine I go through every now and again.
Decision, decisions, decisions.
RSS feeds. About every couple of weeks, or so, I'll unsubscribe from RSS feeds to blogs that have gone stale or somehow strayed from the theme that compelled me to initially subscribe.
Twitter connections. Fairly regularly, I'll "unfollow" connections on Twitter to those who noise-up my twitterstream with an over-abundance of one-on-one "@" messages. (Don't get me wrong. I don't have an objection to individuals directing a tweet to another individual. But when the stream from any individual contact starts approaching a volume that feels like about a quarter or a third of that individual's total twitstream, I start to feel like the fourth wheel. And, just as I do in live meetings, when I start feeling like the fourth guy in a circle of three other clique-y friends obsessed with each other, I simply walk away in search of other, more considerate networkers.)
LinkedIn contacts. Less frequently and with more consideration, I may quietly remove connections on LinkedIn to contacts who haven't interacted with either me or the community in some time. At a minimum, I usually like to see some kind of status update from my contacts, or an attempt to answer questions from others in the Q&A forum or contribute to the dialog in one of the many discussion forums on LinkedIn.
Facebook friends. Facebook is a slightly different animal. Since I use it as a place to "let my hair down" (so to speak) I tend to be a bit more selective about the "friends" I let in that circle to begin with. Consequently, my friends list tends to be just that, real world friends and/or family members; people I've interacted with face to face and actually shook hands with or shared a meal with. As a result of the front end due dilligence, my Facebook list tends to be culled less frequently.
Keeping it "real."
By actively tending to my virtual garden of relationships, my hope is to end up with a network--smaller though it may be than others--that is comprised of the relationships that matter.
Michael Silverman, an attendee at the Inc. 5000 Conference held in Washington, D.C. this past September, asked an expert panel comprised of: Seth Godin, Tom Peters, and Susan Sobbott, about the value of social networking. I liked Silverman's question for the response it generated:
Excerpts below from Godin's response:
... what matters is where are the real relationships?
...Networking is always important when it's real. And it's always a useless distraction when it's fake. What the internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place. And it's so easy to be seduced by it because there's a dashboard and a scoreboard...And it's nonesense... It's like measuring hits to your web site, it doesn't translate.
What translates is (the question), 'Are there people out there who I would go out my way for, and who would go out of their way for me? That's what you need to keep track of. And the way you get there is by going out of your way for them. And by earning the privelege of one day having that connection be worthwhile.
The 2-minute video clip above can be found here. But, if you haven't seen the rest of the series from the conference, it's worth clicking through or bookmarking the site here.
What do you think? Do you cull your lists every now and then? What criteria do you use to keep your relationships "real"?
