Is your friendship worth anything?

Advertisers and research institutes are dying to know what are the chances that your twitter followers or your facebook friends or your Linkedin Connects will click on the same ad you clicked on last night. Calculating the power of digital friendship is becoming a full time occupation of marketers. We maynot think of our friends in such mercantile terms but for corporates and businesses the value of friendship data is trended to grow
One team at IBM Research studying anonymous data of big blues consultants concluded that employees who forged tighter email connections with their boss brought it an average of $588 more in monthly revenue
Decoding friendships is the key to getting consumer’s attention .However it is an inexact science. 33 across stitches together friendship profiles of tens of millions by partnering with various social networks,chat providers and widget makers. Rapleaf which harvested data from blogs,online forums and social networks furnishes friendship data to help clients fine- tune their promotions.
A platform called Blippy allows you to connect to your social system and share what you bought and how much you spent at retailers like Target, Netflix, Amazon, and Zappos, to name a few. Knowing what people are buying when, and how much they're willing to spend is creating a feeding frenzy among marketers looking for the ripple effect. Not even the drumbeat of privacy concerns seems able to slow down the trend
The meshing of search and social will be embodied by the arrival of Google's Social Search option, where you can see the information posted by people within your online social circle. The early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends. Everyone has a social graph. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move towards a "social web" whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook's new "reconnect with" feature is one implementation of social graph data.
The social graph needs two kinds of tool to work. At the service end, it needs algorithms -- the formulae that use your graph to determine what information and connections you value most, which allows services to predict what information you're going to like (including, of course, which products and marketing communications you'll appreciate). At the user end, it needs filters -- the ability to group people and information more effectively to get the most out of a network.
Most algorithms define networks simplistically--people are either connected or not, without a way to indicate the gray areas common in real life like in person meetings or breakups even though you remain e-connnected. Algorithms would have to examine and compare complex behavior over time and in the context of other connections to understand this.


So how do we build and manage our social graphs, how many social profiles should we actively manage? So the takeaway from a recent polling indicated that for most of us on a personal level, there is indeed a point of diminishing return for overextending yourself into the social universe. You simply can’t be in all places at the same time and with the same level of valued engagement and immersion.As mentioned above there are three basic “must have” accounts, e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Then, you have the option to pick and choose a couple of others based on personal preferences or business and career needs without risking a complete time management overload such as Plaxo or Plaxo Pulse, even a rich media account such as Flickr or YouTube
It should be noted that your choices today, may not be the choices or the right choices for tomorrow. The point here is that destination sites like those just mentioned are sites with popularity today.

Aside from your tier one social profiles, there are some additional accounts that should be considered to expand your online presence which require relatively little or no maintenance and can be periodically managed without detracting from managing your core social profiles. Accounts such as Google and Yahoo profiles are two great examples. And I have selected a group of content management, bookmarking and sharing tools such as Digg, Google Reader, which I use on a periodic basis.You could try Delicious, Sharaholic etc.
As time passes, your social graph and profiles may expand as needs arise and as new knowledge is desired. Continue to experiment as much as you can. Learn the sites, tools and destinations. But keep a reality check on how much time and commitment you can personally invest.
What does matter is how you are engaged within it and the value you are bringing to your community peers. If you can’t manage your current social graph based on realistic personal and professional expectations, then you have reached the point of diminishing returns and you need to re-evaluate where you are engaging.