Top 5 ways to deepen online friendships – friending

I've been mulling over some recent information I found online at The Guardian Unlimited about the difficulties we're experiencing in deepening our online relationships with social networking tools.

These problems with online friending have captured my imagination and so I put up a post called "Will you be my friend" a week ago on my personal blog julians.name. In my attempts to be spontaneous and unedited (my vlogging policy) I misrepresented some of my true thinking on this topic. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that my current thinking is in flux. I'm feeling my way through this stuff just like many of you.

I intended that post and a follow up (this one) to be published on our business blog exceler8ion. Here it is.

Here's a summary of the content and some show notes.

First, a correction 'You can't teach an OLD dog new tricks." Just had to get that out of the way.

The video is 18 minutes but HOLD on!

Ouch.

That's better. 

The good news is that I've made a significant number of my points in the first 6-7 minutes which isn't too terrible. You'll have to watch the whole piece if you want to hear my personal example of attempting to friend a colleague of mine – Shel Israel, co-author (along with Robert Scoble) of Naked Conversations who sent me to his blog to read his Facebook friend policy after I tried to connect with him on Facebook. 

Here's the top 5 for people who don't have time to watch:

TOP 5 FRIENDING TECHNIQUES

How to deepen relationships through social networking tools and social media.

1. Be active not passive
2. Make one-to-one contact
3. Respond to questions
4. Play is central
5. Pay attention to people (visibly) Thanks to my lovely bride Shannon!

The rest of my video discusses these points in more detail and recounts my experience to date with friending Shel.

Jules