Friends are more than hyperlinks

I extract from Bernaise Sourse.

He says: Apparently, competition for friends among the younger set can be fierce. Too few friends, and you are like way uncool.

Apparently friending has become big business.

Rachael King recently reported in Business Week: "As companies try to build or keep relevancy among young people, they're increasingly tailoring marketing campaigns specifically to social networks. These go far beyond placing banner ads on a site, and involve interaction with users over time in what companies hope will be a memorable way...Burger King, for instance, created a MySpace page for the King, the weird character that appears in their commercials."

There are some who think it is no longer a matter of numbers anyway. There is an emerging school of thought that says - when it comes to social media -- the level of customer engagement is the more meaningful metric.

There is evidence elsewhere that the friends where there is a big numbers game going on are regarded differently to the friends in a social network where introductions are made at a very personal level. The interaction does count.

This is really about this acknowledgement of values and creation of relationships through mutually accepted values.

Berger King is a token with values and it will only have a relationship with its 120,000 'friends' in MySpace if it is able to find the values of those friends to which it can offer empathetic values. Otherwise its friends are unused hyperlinks.