Quality vs. Quantity in Social Networking

Rhohit Bhargava's 3 Social Media New Year's Resolutions snagged my attention:

1. Comment more
2. Answer the phone less
3. Make better friends (and be one two)

Rhohit takes pains to point out that he's not casting a negative light on his current circle of online friends. It's just that a lot of folks measure success by quantity, and that the higher the numbers, the lower the quality of the relationships tend to be.

These resonate with me. I have so many folks that I've met at conferences or online that I've never really actively cultivated relationships with online. Some of it is a touch of shyness I guess, but it's as much a matter of just making it more of a priority. I have a small circle of online "friends" compared to many folks. They're quality people, but I can't always say that they're quality relationships simply because to have that quality you need to invest time in the relationship.

Here's the rub. Odd as it may sound, I spend very little time tracking my own blog stats or personal "reach". I just accept that it will have to evolve at it's own pace because there simply aren't enough hours in the week.

On the other hand, most of my time is spent helping clients get some traction with their own efforts to increase their online visibility. In most cases, even when they "get" social media as a concept, and grasp tactics such as social bookmarking, they aren't prepared to redirect resources toward that end. More often than not they just want more gain and less pain.

So, that begs the question: "how can this be automated?"

Lee Odden had a useful post on Social Bookmarking Submission Tools. Ah, now we're talking!

But wait! Lee also has an earlier post entitled Is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Passive or Active?

Community involvement is a necessity with an active approach, especially through building up of a profile(s), growing a friends list and interacting/contributing via editorial, content submissions, commenting and voting.

This also hits home, but do you see the dilemma? It's proven to be effective to make your content shareable through social bookmarking communities. These communities are proliferating, and the trend is toward tighter niches with narrower foci. I see that as a good thing, as opposed to just throwing yourself into the Digg ocean for instance, but it also means that you need to invest a ton of time in building relationships and presence in those niches.

If you take Rhohit's resolutions to heart and embrace Lee's points about community involvement, it would seem that automating the submission process to multiple social bookmarking sites is only going to be effective to the degree that you've cultivated relationships in each community and are prepared to invest the time in maintaining them.

At any rate, I'm going to be testing this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.