I mentioned this at a conference, and I’m not sure I ever codified it properly. So, who is a friend?

According to Wikipedia, “Friendship is co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis.”

In Social Networks, a friend is someone who is willing to click “add this person” in a dialog box. We have very few ways of distinguishing other people’s true friends – the ones who share mutual affection or who would give service in a crisis – from their long time college acquaintances, neighborhood well wishers, elementary school reminiscences, and stalker ex-girlfriends. One early social network, Orkut from Google, actually allowed you to indicate how close you were to a person from “never met” to “best friend.” Today’s Facebook allows you to put friends into lists so you can ignore the ones you connected with but don’t really know, but that’s not the same thing.

The network that is most lacking in a way to distinguish levels of connection is LinkedIn. Since much of the intention behind the network is business networking and creating connections between friends, people often ask for referals to others. When you look for a way to make a connection to Bill, you may see that you’re connected by “John, Jane and 12 others.” Wouldn’t it be best if you were able to request the connection through John, who you know as well as 8 on a scale of 1-10 and who knows Bill as a 9 on the same scale? Instead you may ask Jane, who you also know as an 8, but who only knows Bill as a 2 – yet you may have no way of knowing this. This could lead to Jane awkwardly declining to make the connection, or having her request ignored.

I believe that as social networking services evolve, we’ll have more choices in how we distinguish our degrees of relationships, and how we expose that data to others. A project like the “Friend of a Friend Project” is doing so, and others such as Yahoo are attempting to start to use that data. Let’s hope we can somehow come up with words as descriptive as icy, powdery, slushy and packed to let us distinguish between our BFFs and our FOAFs.

How To Boost Your Social Media Productivity – A Guide For Busy People

In this post, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of articles with great advice, tips and tools to help you be more productive and efficient when using social media. We also have some posts that offer up general online productivity insights.

And, don’t forget to read the comments on the post – a few people have given their own suggestions. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

This is where my reality lies. I seem to get a huge volume of information daily, but the best information comes from my friends (and by friends, I mean both those who I really know and spend time with, and those who are in name-only on social networks).

Clay names this ‘superdistribution’ – the sharing of content from friend to friend. I’m more likely to learn about breaking news from @breakingnewson on Twitter or someone re-tweeting that than I am by reading NYTimes.com these days. And that, in a nutshell, is a big problem for the Times. It is not un-solvable. And I do believe people at NYT are thinking about it. It will be interesting to see how quickly that translates to action.

We discuss the Clue Train 10 years later, and how much of what was predicted actually came true.

When they told us that this:

would be ready by end of August, I wasn’t so sure.

However,as Bill reports about the E.Factor Lounge opening, and as this Dutch blog shows, clearly the building is done and as beautiful as envisioned.

The thing I like about E.Factor is that they envision Social Networking as both an online and an in-person experience, and this is a first step towards that vision.

Now, I just need another gig to get back to Amsterdam so I can spend time in the lounge! (And one is opening in NYC soon!)

Online Spin » Blog Archive » A Different Perspective On Social Media Marketing

Last week I was invited by Dr. Augustine Fou, senior vice president/digital strategist, MRM Worldwide, to speak to a great group at MRM in an inter-agency meeting focusing on understanding social media’s implications for the agency business.

Some good discussion over there in the comments, too.

Cut from the piece was my interview with Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and co-Founder of DidIt.com, an online marketing firm. Lee uses LinkedIn answers to help him form ideas for his weekly column in ClickZ.com as well as researching business ideas, including looking for consultative expertise. He posts questions, researching issues, and gathering expertise from throughout his network.

LinkedIn also has a facility for passing on job postings.  Lee’s firm hired several people this way, both from referrals and direct respondents to the listings. Since he’s got around 4000 direct connections, his postings get a wide dispersal.  Another advantage of using Linkedin over other Job sites has been that the “hit” rate on resumes is greater – fewer bad resumes to weed out. “You can also can see both their resume and their LinkedIn profile to compare them to make sure the person isn’t ‘tuning’ their resume too much for you.”

Lee is also interested to see who’s endorsed them, and might follow up if he knows an endorser. If the person had an endorsement with a fairly senior executive, that may be more valuable than what the endorsement said – Lee figures the existence of an executive’s endorsement is indicative of a person’s ability to create relationships.

I also interviewed author Shel Horowitz, who has written 7 books, including Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers. Not surprisingly, he’s found some very valuable ways to use Facebook, as well as Plaxo’s Pulse connection service, and Social Networks CollectiveX and Ning. His constant posting and cultivation of his social networks have lead him to a guest spot on a business radio show, discussions with a European meeting planner about speaking at his marketing conference in France and even an invitation to consider starting an East Coast office for a well-respected West Coast PR firm.

Networking 2.0 is the new reality. As I note in my article, “There’s no denying that face-to-face networking is still a powerful way to meet and connect with potential clients. But online social networking is becoming more and more useful for doing these same things and more.” How do you leverage both the online and in person networks you have to do business? Comments are open below.

After a great drive out to Eindhoven, (thanks Martin), and some initial networking, I met Tom Paffen and Tom De Bryune who spoke on Venture Capital raising and on “Freaks and Geeks” as the leading indicators of where social media and social networking tech are heading as cultural and technical phenomenon.

The photo set is on Flickr.

Bill and I spoke after the break. Bill did an excellent job talking about the “3 screen world” where TV, Computers and Smart Phones are the locations that people are using when they view and interact with content, all to different extents, of course. I chimed in afterward about how media companies are using Social Web tools to create new kinds of stories (like the Heroes show and related content), and also about how, as seems to come up in conversations a lot lately – destination sites are not the future. Having content everywhere, via syndication, mashup, widgets, and basically where your viewer, user, customer wants it, will be the future. The panel finished with questions and more networking.

I know the slides and information on the panel, as well as the full video will soon be posted on Efactor.com and I’ll update with a link to that when it’s available.

BTW, Mashable did a brief review of the E.factor here.

Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money – by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks. Get the pdf version here.