Thursday, June 11, 2009

Measuring online friendships

As part of my ongoing facination with the Corporate Social Graph and its personal equivalent, I've been researching the range of online friendships a person can have (with the aim of seeing if this matches the organisation ones).

After reading the work of Mike Arauz on his 'Spectrum of friendship', I'm tempted to suggest that the range he gives may be similar to the 'friendship' customers have for companies.
Here's how I think it works (and the difference):

Passive Interest:
A person is aware of a company and has visited the website

Active Interest:
They have been to the website several times and interacted with it (e.g. engaged with the content, bought something, been encouraged to do something in an offline channel, etc.)

Sharing:
An individaul has linked to the company website (e.g. via Twitter) or joined a group (e.g. become a fan of them on Facebook)


Public Dialogue AND Advocacy:
I've participated online with or about the organisation (e.g. posted a product review, sent a page/link to friend, contributed to a discussion forum, etc.)

Investment:
Now here's where I get stuck. I can't actually make up my mind if this is a capital investment (e.g. stocks & shares), an emotional investment (in that case its mixed in with Public Dialogue and Advocacy) or another....
Any thoughts?

2 comments:

Boudewijn said...

I think it's maybe a bit more complex; it should probably be a matrix rather than one-dimensional spectrum as it is shown now.

For instance, I imagine you'll have private dialogues with people who wouldn't dream of posting comments and vice versa. I've advocated http://www.youtube.com/mattrach to friends without ever having posted a comment and I never sent a private message either.

And the investment phase is interesting indeed. This looks good when pitching an idea to a potential client (customers investing! cool!) but how do I do that other than buying as much crap as I can?

Emotional investment, is that more than advocacy?

Hrm... the more I think about it, the worse it looks :-)

Hayden Sutherland said...

Boudewijn.
How about this idea then... how about if people and companies had a value for each of the different types of 'friendships' they could have? This would match your thoughts on advocacy without posting a comment, and still allow us to model public engagement without advocacy!
Obviously this would have a different weighting for companies and individuals... and therefore the different strengths of each could be leveraged.
Job done!