Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy Friends

I believe in slow growth. Not because I side with the tortoise more than the hare, not because a fifty-yard dash takes me half the day and certainly not because of the snail tattoo on my shoulder, but because of social media.

Fast vs Slow Growth

I chuckle at the paradoxical thought of how immediate social media is yet to grow and nurture an audience takes some time. And it rightfully should take some time to mature. In an age where we move and regurgitate information almost at the proverbial speed of light (or at least the speed of sound) getting more than one or two people to listen is not as quick.

There are certainly ways to shortcut getting an audience but do we want to. Do we want to “buy friends?” Probably not. At a recent conference I offered up the line “friends don’t let friends buy friends” meaning that coercing your friends into buying or using a service that doesn’t fit in with their lifestyle. For example:

– You run a facebook fan page for a glue company.
– The glue company is a sponsor of a really popular television show that has many fans on their facebook fanpage.
– You want those fans.
– For whatever reason the people that watch the show are really into tape and not that into glue.
– You start offering prizes related to the television show to people that become fans of your glue company.

You may end up getting a few genuine fans but after the prizes run out and there is nothing to tie these new “fans” to your company they are going to walk. Certainly any sales lead you might have thought you had will also vanish, remember these people are into tape not glue.  Silly example aside, the bottom line is buying friends doesn’t work in the long run they are just going to walk away. It doesn’t work in really life why would it work on line where the need to be real, genuine, is a necessity nowadays and being disingenuous gets amplified to very wide audience.

At the end of August a local DC sports reporter, Mike Wise, tweeted an untrue statement about Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Subsequently, Wise was suspended from the outlets he worked with. More than that his reputation was tarnished. Wise said it was an experiment that went wrong and even admitted he thought his credibility had been damaged. Here is a link to the WashingtonPost.com article. As this example illustrates that even something that is set as an experiment can go wrong and not being true will hurt you. That is exactly what buying friends ends up doing, hurting you.

These bought friends have no allegiance to you nor an affinity with whatever your product is and if you end up pissing them off in some manner they will walk and the digital word of mouth might strike back at you. If you piss off a real friend they will be angry with you but they will ultimately forgive you and return as your friend. This is why I believe in slow growth. It works, it develops relationships that have the possibility of lasting a lifetime and most of the time the scenery is much more pleasant at 10MPH than 100MPH.

By the way, I don’t really have a snail tattoo.