Jul 11
30
What’s Your Number?
size-full wp-image-838″ title=”dunbar_postit” src=”http://lncpracticebuilder.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/dunbar_postit.png” alt=”" width=”240″ height=”240″ />In recent posts, I have opined philosophical theories related to marketing your Legal Nurse Consulting practice. Today is no different. The other day I was meeting a friend for happy hour at a local bistro. While waiting at the beautiful mahogany curved bar that followed along the wall, I noticed my fellow patrons sitting smartphones in hand not talking to anyone. Even the bartender, Chad looked like he would take any conversation. He glanced in my direction and I jibed, “Remember when people actually used to talk to you guys?” “Yep, we’ve been un-friended, I guess.”
That made me think of an article I read recently that referenced how much time people actually spent on social media. If you know me what I did next won’t surprise you much. I did a little pre-happy hour ad hoc survey…hey that’s what marketers do. I asked each bar fly if they were on Facebook. An overwhelming majority were. Then we proceeded to have a conversation about smartphones and how we just forget to talk to people anymore because we think we already are talking.
According to Elizabeth Bernstein at The Wall Street Journal (a Nielson study), Americans spent 63.5 billion minutes on social networks/blogs (23.8% of online time), 26.1 billion minutes on online games (9.8%), 19.9 billion minutes on e-mails (7.5%), 10.9 billion minutes on portals (4.1%), and 10.7 billion minutes on videos/movies (4.0%).
Facebook recently became more popular than Google according to some studies recently. People reportedly have “friends” in the thousands and are ever scrambling to increase those numbers. And LinkedIn is all about increasing your number of connections. You can even buy connections now to look like a real power player. Is it no wonder we don’t talk to each other? I finally had to turn Facebook posts off on my Blackberry. I would get updates all day long. Some from friends in really powerful jobs and I would wonder don’t you have National Security to protect or something? Regardless, I have blogged before that the constant updating of people’s lives who live in my periphery is difficult for me to embrace.
All of this reminds me of one very important theory called Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s number is suggested to be a hypothetical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. Most believe is between 100 and 230, with a commonly accepted value of 150.
Protagonists of Dunbar’s number assert that larger numbers generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people who you know but no longer communicate with or have social contact with. If you include these, the number may be larger and more dependent on memory.
I often wonder in my son’s 1000+ “friends” how many of those actually matter to him and him to them. He has had the same cohort of friends most of his high school days. I know…. I have fed them all. Many times. Those are the people he has real relationships with; the ones whose parents will help him when I am not available. These are the people who will buy from him. From fundraisers to selling insurance. This is his network.
In the business world I often think that people still do not realize that the quality of the relationships you make is much more important than the quantity. For those power players in social media with thousands of friends, I ask you: How many have you shaken hands with?
When building a remarkable Legal Nurse Consulting practice you must remember that it isn’t about the numbers as much as it is about the names. Do you have real people in your network or virtual ones? Do you want real business or virtual business? If you chose the former then you must focus your marketing efforts more on meeting your network not just making it.
Take homes:
Realistically, how many of your Facebook friends could you recognize at Macy’s?
How many of your LinkedIn connections have you met in person? How many have you asked to meet in person? How many have you even talked to on the phone?
A real business takes real people. Go out and meet some of your friends today. That’s the first step to becoming real. Ok, not according to the Velveteen Rabbit, but you get the idea.
Take five minutes and learn a new way to make your practice remarkable!