When social media became a buzzword, the hot topic was community. Everyone just knew that if you could build a community of people with similar interests, you would have a group of people who also happened to share interests in products and services, so advertising to the community became a way of generating revenue.

Various social networks have tried to establish community tools but all (ok, nearly all) made the same mistake. They allowed communities to become too large to manage. This mistake was largely was driven by the need to advertise to larger audiences in order to maximize revenue. But communities quickly become unruly.  For example, a community of Chevy owners is too large. But a community of 1968 Camaro fanatics is quite manageable.

The second mistake is in format. How often have each of us joined a group only to become quickly bored with the mindless banter that ensues. Text and comments are wrought with negativity, abuse and ignorance.

Enter Pinterest. The format is imagery. Members share thoughts in a way that is instantly communicated. The topics are limited and accidental. I post a pic of my car and within a short while, I attract all sorts of people with an interest in that car. And because the topics are so specialized, groups stay small and manageable.

The real trick for marketers is — how does one aggregate a collection of small, tightly-focused affinity groups into a larger-scale marketing strategy? The start up and management costs are too great to make an profit working with small groups individually. But more on that in a future post.

As always, I welcome your opinion.

Don’t take it personally, but I can only take so many pithy sayings, spiritual revelations or inspirational quotes and photos before I barf. It’s not that these things are irrelevant. In fact, quite the opposite. One of the big benefits of social media is that humans can share their innermost feelings with others in an otherwise impersonal medium. But I can only take so much.

As a matter of fact, I think I speak for all of you as well. C’mon, admit that you often see things appear on your Facebook news feed that you wish weren’t there. You can’t wait to reach up and click that unsubscribe option, permanently removing that rubbish from your sacred news feed.

So how much is enough? Or better yet, how many friends are enough? Dunbar’s number famously predicts that an average of 150 friends is all we can effectively manage in the social sphere. But that assumes intimate relationships – people with whom we can carry on meaningful social relationships. I want to greatly exceed that number. I want thousands of “friends” so I can choose the handful that actually entertain, inform or inspire me. You might be my friend, but if you work at an animal shelter (an admirable pursuit!) I don’t want to see pictures of poor little puppies about to be “euthanized today if you don’t take immediate action” going across my news feed. I don’t need you preaching the wonderful gospel to me publicly. That is what churches and the privacy of my home are for. And I certainly don’t give a fiddly-foot about your political opinions!

So I have the ability to unsubscribe and NOT follow those who chose a particular communication path that I could care less about. That is great! You just continue expressing your heart out and sharing your passion but don’t be offended if I unsubscribe.

Which brings me back to Dunbar. What is the “right number” of social media friends? Although I consider many of the folks to whom I have unsubscribed to be  “friends”, I estimate that this represents about 90% of my connections. Doing the reverse math,  I need 1500 connections to find the 150 that I want to hear from on a regular basis. So I am laying claim to the definition of this number. Let’s be completely arbitrary and call it Wolfgram’s Number.

Wolfgram’s number is the number of social media connections that you must have in order to maintain a constant stream of relevant information from “Dunbar’s number” of those connections.

My WN is 1500. What’s yours? I welcome your comments.

But back to basics. The question I ask automation advocates to consider is simple, why? Why are you automating? If it is to try to hit as many people ans you can as rapidly as possible in an effort to generate sales from them, the social media ethos will quickly ensure that your marketing programs have all the rigidity of unrefrigerated fish. But if you have decided that having a presence in the social media sphere of influence is good for your business and you want to use automated tasks to ‘automate’ (duh!) some of your monotonous routines to make your business run more efficiently, then that is quite a different story.In short, NOT automating would be like a slap in the face (with the same unrefrigerated fish) to the entire world of technology and the advantages it provides us.

Success in social automation relies on three factors:

1. Sincerity
2. Frequency
3. Consequence

Your messages must be obviously sincere to even the most casual of readers. They must arrive at a frequency such that they are interpreted to be part of the on-going social conversation. And to prove you are human, you must provide what I call a ‘fleshy capthca’ or real human responses to inquiries. If the message is sincere (no matter WHO wrote it), it arrives in a non-offensive way and the back-end of the conversation is with a real human, then who is hurt by automation? It is all about the intent, not the content, method or tools.

I welcome your thoughts.

I hope that you’ll find my opinions refreshing and thought provoking. They are not intended to offend or cause undue stress in anyone nor are they designed to in any way threaten our friendship. If you disagree with me, please feel free to say so in the comments.

Cheers!

Doug