Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

DoshDosh points out some interesting research on people’s relationships and technology:

According to a recent study of 2 million people and 8 million phone calls over one year, researchers discovered that the cause of persistent relationships is reciprocity - returning a friend’s call. The more often you call each other, the longer your relationship.

The results showed that the strongest factor determining persistence values was when individuals returned calls to each other. When links were reciprocated, those links had a greater chance of persisting for longer time periods. Also, when an individual´s connections had connections among themselves (when a person´s friends knew each other), his or her own connections lasted longer.

It’s a topic I’ve touched on before and something which I think is increasingly relevant for organisations who are seeking to engage their audiences on social networking sites. As I pointed out in the past:

Metcalfe’s Law is due a revision. It currently dictates that the value of a network is determined by the amount of users of that network - “A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.”

In the past the value of your network depended on how many people owned a fax machine. Today, however, Metcalfe’s Law should take account of how many people send faxes to each other. The value of the network also depends on the level of activity in it. While some social networks may not reach the same scale as Bebo or MySpace, they will remain very valuable to their users due to an active community.

As organisations create profiles for themselves on social networking sites, it is increasingly naive of them to think that the value of their network is based on the number of friends that they have. Instead it should be judged by the level of interaction they have, whether that’s in the form of profile views, comments or how many people have installed and are using their widget on a regular basis.

I honestly believe that organisations thinking about creating a social networking profile should also take the time to think about how they plan to engage their audience once their profile goes live. Social networks aren’t like the movie Field of Dreams - if you build it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will come.

I wholeheartedly believe that any organisation that wants to succeed online needs to be an active participant with their audience. For example, the simplest way for anyone to build an audience for their blog is to visit other blogs regularly and leave comments. Sure enough, you will find that people begin to reciprocate.

This ultimately goes back to the research that Maki highlights on DoshDosh - the cause of persistent relationships is reciprocity.