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baseball20card20500020count20lot-main_FullWe have a lot of friends on Facebook.  Some of us may have thousands of connections on LinkedIn.  Maybe our biggest “people collection” lives on Twitter.  But what good is it all?

Collectors
Baseball cards were really popular when I was kid.  My friends and I would haul around boxes of thousands of cards.  We spent countless hours ogling the pictures of our childhood heroes, reading their stats and trading them around.  Some cards were valuable (according to the pricing guides) and some were just cardboard.  The equation was simple.  A big collection of cards meant you were in with the cool kids.

None of us ever got rich from our baseball card collections, and for most of my friends and I, baseball cards lost their luster somewhere around high school, when girls suddenly became the new trend.

Seth Godin on Social Networking
This is a brilliant two minute clip.  Seth Godin is the master at delivering real value in very short snippets of content.

While sitting on a panel at an Open Forum event (which in itself, is an interesting marketing idea from American Express), Seth reminds us of where the real value lies in using the internet to to build relationships.  Watch Seth’s response to the question from Michael Silverman.

Question: Is social networking valuable to business?

Sometimes, we fake network.  We add connections in order to move the needle on our people collections.

But social networking isn’t trading baseball cards.  You and I both know it has value in business if used wisely.

Thoughts?

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  • I think Seth has it right, but I'm not sure his point resonates because of his overemphasis in pointing out that it's not about the numbers. We all know it's about the relationships because we are here everyday in those relationships. An audience who hears the word "worthless" before they hear the words "going out of your way," might just say it's all worthless and throw it away.

    How many times have you gone to a conference and heard concerns about time wasting, or Social Media not being "real work, or really productive?" Those just grate on me. I fear Seth might allow those concerns to be validated in the way he answers the question.

    Then again, he is Seth Godin, and I most definitely am not. Probably just my interpretation...
  • @Ben Lumley - I agree, many people who have thousands of followers on Twitter do value quantity over quality. For a person who's trying to go quality over quantity, I must admit that it can be hard at times to form those relationships. This is just based on the fact that forming the relationships via social media often isn't an face-to-face thing, and sometimes it is tough to get noticed in the crowd.
  • Seth's got it spot on here. Know plenty of people who have 1000s of followers on Twitter, for example, who are just interested in getting more followers rather than making connections. Quality over Quantity

    Follow me up Benlumley6
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