The Modern Day Handshake

I have grown up in the digital era. I have never known a time where you could start a friendship or a business relationship by only one of two ways; in person or by phone (I guess I could mention snail mail but for sake of argument I’m leaving it out). My social and professional circles have developed through Facebook and LinkedIn friend requests, and Facebook’s latest concoction is only adding to the chaos.

“People You May Know” is the latest fature to show up on the post- login page for Facebook. Random blasts from the past or complete strangers have begun to popup to encourage what I’m calling the “modern day handshake.” A friend request through either Facebook or LinkedIn is now a fully acceptable form of reaching out to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, or someone you’ve wanted to introduce yourself to. A recent flurry of friend requests from people I went to elementary school with brought up this question while I ran my ass off in a recent football training session (the European kind):

Are these friend requests meaningless?



More than half of the friend requests I get constitute the beginning and end of these relationships. You get a friend request from someone you haven’t seen in years. You confirm the request. You look at their profile. Maybe gawk at some photos. Then that’s it. It’s over. We have just had our reunion and we are through.

So what is that? What did we just do? I’m not that old and I haven’t been in marketing for very long. My business is about connecting people. It’s about bringing people and the brands they care about together. And it’s about developing forums for people to engage with each other in new and inventive ways. But are we really getting involved with those people we reach out to? Is the goal to build the size of our contacts list, or is it to actually develop new and old friendships?

Compete Analytics just told me that in February 2008, 28.5 million unique visitors visited Facebook. I’m not saying these millions of people are heartless, vapid, or shallow. I’m just saying there was once another way to do this, before my generation took over. I use Facebook every day, and I don’t we propose we shut it down and start over.

In my opinion, Facebook is supposed to compliment a relationship. The same way we need to implement mobile advertising to start complimenting our traditional marketing programs.

I propose this: follow up that friend request with a Facebook message. You don’t even have to leave the website. I was going to suggest an email or phone call even, but it’s ok. Baby steps.