Facebook Friends. and High School. (philoking blog...)

This is only kind of tangential to photography, except that every photographer I know not only has a personal FB page but also fan pages and group pages and business pages. It's a great post, too, much more balanced that what I feel every time I swear I'm going to get off FB forever.

"What Facebook taught me about friends and high school" from Jason Burns site sums it up...

You've got a lot of issues going on here. They all are, for me, rooted in the idea that you've got to get your name out there, and in so doing, take all comers. After a while, though, I think the secret to managing this access is to weed contacts out occasionally. I just did so. Here were my criteria.

If I thought someone was a jerk, either back in the day, or even just recently, I give them a chance to show they're not, that I was wrong. If they re-prove to me they're a jerk, they're gone. If, after a few months, they haven't shown signs of promise- either no activity, or just the same old stuff, then they're gone.

If you have someone who just isn't active, maybe has a few friends, but doesn't update and doesn't respond to messages, they're gone. Well, they were never there, really...

If someone contacts me that I don't know, I'll usually accept their contact. If, however, they are simply "collecting"- that is, trying to add contacts just to either add contacts, or to promote themselves with no particular reciprocal promotion or support, then they're gone. This could be either a photographer or company or something, or one of the big superstars. But generally the superstars aren't going to be approaching me, I will have approached them. Same rules apply, though.

...that is, unless I get something out of the contact. John Nack, for example, of Adobe, does great FB updates- both from his blog, helping with Photoshop issues, but also just hysterical stories and photos from his family... fun stuff. He stays.

You may wonder why you should eliminate contacts. Noise, pure and simple. As soon as I got my "friends" down to a manageable level, I started seeing the feeds from the people I cared about again. You can say, just hide them. Why hide them if you don't care to keep contact with them?

A little story. I've done every type of marketing and promotion known, as far as I know. Getting a response has been increasingly hard, as we're all inundated by messages one way or another. I just sent an email out to a very select group of friends and contacts. Just 25 of them. I got about 8 people responding- emails, even phone calls. This was not a personal message, mind you, this was promoting a service I'm offering... that was OVER 25% response, simply unheard-of. Another guy I heard speak, recently, says we're back to a hand-written card. He was funny- he said it's going to stay on the desk, nobody will throw one of those away.

When did you last get a hand-written card? Still have it? I put them on my board...

The point is, blanket emails, huge contact lists, Twitter feeds and blogging and such, unless you're John Nack or somebody with some huge horsepower just feeds the wave of stuff we get hit by and ignore so effectively. Whittling down to the people who care about your message, and you care about, is the secret to making and keeping good contacts.

This, from Jason's post:
"Once you survey the landscape and figure out who is meaningful to you, drop the outliers. Build a clan, share your life and have fun.

The real value of Facebook to me is those interactions. I would wake up tomorrow a happy man if a virus ripped through Facebook over night and shredded all of the fan pages, the Mob Wars, faux-causes and quizzes. Those things are on a one way trip to ignore-ville for me anyway. But I still thank Facebook for helping me put some perspective on relationships that I have questioned for years, and helping me find new ones."