Retrobuilding Part 2: Impact on Relationships

Today I attended a seminar that Shel Holtz did on using social media to communicate with your customers. He quoted from a recent study that for 62% of content consumed by Digital Natives is created by someone they know personally.   

It got me thinking again about how we–Digital Immigrants–will be the last generation to retrobuild our social networks because Digital Natives’ networks are just as established in the digital world as they are in the analog world.

I started to wonder to what extent Digital Natives’ networks are based upon and comprised of relationships that they have established through in-person, face-to-face interaction, e.g. friends from school, versus through online-first interaction, e.g. online multiplayer games or social networks like MySpace?

I concluded that one’s “digital citizenship” (being a native versus and immigrant) does not impact the composition of one’s social network as much as one’s level of digital experience.

Because members of the younger generation have always been online, they are further along the social media learning curve at younger ages than Digital Immigrants. Therefore, they are likely to establish digitally-founded relationships at younger ages. If this is the case, their social networks will be more mixed (defining “mixed” in this case as ratio of in-person-generated relationships to online-generated relationships) than the social networks of Digital Immigrants.

I also posit that retrobuilding one’s personal social network precedes creating new digitally-based relationships. Digitally-based relationships only come after establishing some level of digital experience, comfort and savvy.  My own experience has been that I entered the social media space by (to?) retrobuilding my existing face-to-face-based network. Now that I am exploring the social media space further, I am beginning to establish digitally-founded relationships by participating in blog and microblog discussions and other online-only interactions.

Because Digital Natives start out as fluent digital social networkers, they can establish relationships as easily online as they do offline. Therefore, we could make the assumption that Digital Natives’ social networks contain higher percentages of people they’ve never met face-to-face than the social networks of Digital Immigrants or of non-participants in social media. 

Thinking through the implications of this is fascinating.  At some point I hope to conduct research comparing digitally-generated relationships and offline-generated relationships against the following qualitative metrics:

• strength
• sustainability
• duration
• value
• substance
• sincerity
• satisfaction

I’m sure that there are others…. 

Retrobuilding

So you’ve joined the social networking craze and now you receive daily requests be “LinkedIn” and to be “friends” on Facebook. You’re finding camp friends from 1982 and being found–stalked?–by girlfriends from 1993. It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s fun…it’s time consuming…it’s eating into your gym time…it’s an excuse to stay in on Friday nights. Hmmm…

Plus, aren’t you feeling a twinge of deja vu with all of this? I mean, you already know these people, or, if you’ve lost touch with them, maybe there was a good reason…. So what’s this all about? What are we DOING!?

Well, I’ve coined a term for this: we are “retrobuilding” our social networks. We are going back in time and piecing together our friends, acquaintances, college hook-ups, and former colleagues so that we can easily draw upon our social networks as needed.

In fact, the potential value of our social networks –if well retrobuilt –is so great that our numbers of LinkedIn “connections” and Facebook “friends” are becoming the new status symbols. You know how the the cocktail party conversation goes: “How many Facebook friends do you have? Oh, only 34. Well, you know, I’ve been on for 7 months now, so that’s why I have so many. You’ll get there…”

We’re moving from a world in which money = power to one in which influence potential = power. The values of our society are changing.

What’s interesting is that even though retrobuilding is a relatively new phenomenon, we will be the last generation to retrobuild. No, I don’t believe that social networking is going away, it’s just that Digital Natives have no need to retrobuild: they’ve only lived in a digital world. Their friends and contacts are already digitized. They are as connected to their friends on MySpace as they are in person at school, as they are via SMS.

So what will be the status symbols of the 21st century? I’d argue that influence is pretty high up there, so you’d better go get retrobuilding.