In my quest to understand who and how we use social networking website, I’d launch the conversation with heavy users.Definition:
To put it in a nutshell, I’d define a heavy user in term of number of contacts in the profile. One could consider the number of visits, time spent, or other criteria but I arbitrary chose the number of contacts in Profile.
Arbitrarily, I would say that a heavy user has more than 250+ contacts (a lower number would give sens as well)
Question: What does it mean having a lot of profile in your profile?
Let’s be frank. How many persons you really keep in contact? 100-150 persons?
I said frankly!!!
Hmmmmmm, 60-70?
So what does it mean when someone make of his network profile a Xmas wish list of names?
The persons I know and that are really good in networking are not using online social networks. They are social networks.
Of course, if your job is to develop your network for professional reasons, I see recruitment professions for instance, the question is different. But for the others?
I made a test. I tried to contact persons in my network in order to obtain a contact. I’ve tried those who are very (over) networked on online social networks and those who are reasonably networked.
The result is that the heavy users do not answer to telephone or do not pass contacts… Sad, no? Or maybe I am not a person one can introduce?
For non-heavy users, they answer to the phone and pass contacts…
So. Taking into account that I am still the same person when I am calling these two kind of network users and that there is not difference of hierarchy in the persons I contacted, is there some consequences to take from this short experience?
Without studying too long this issue, I would say that heavy users are wanna-be networked persons but are not really, or persons that didn’t really understood the interest of these kind of services…
Online social networks are made to facilitate the exchange of contact, aren’t they?
Being networked is global and time occurring, i.e. in real life, your are networked at one moment. Social networks of a person changes, moves, grow but also diminishes according to the time and the space.
This is not the case for online networks. With online networks, you add contacts like pearls and keep it all the rest of your life (who is really deleting contacts from his profile when is not anymore in contact with a person?).
In a normal life, you meet always the same persons. And you learn to know and respect these persons by meeting them again and again.
When you have 250+ contacts, you don’t really know the contacts you have.
And when you need to introduce some of your contacts to another contact, you have a problem as you need to introduce two persons you don’t know…
So do Heavy users = Low quality networks?
Well, let’s think about this…
