Keeping the Social in Social Media

Last night I was talking with NowSourcing. He has an experiment going on where he’s taking social media “to the streets.” For the next 10 weeks, he wants to start meeting the people that he’s interacted with, bringing a personal touch back to social media.

Several months ago, Dr. Mani shrank the number of people he was following on Twitter down to 40. I watched this experiment with interest, curious to see how it would work, and the results were amazing. Instead of growing dissatisfied with Twitter, having only a few people to follow allowed him to interact with each person individually and to become real friends with them instead of acquaintances.

We like to say that social media is about the people and conversations, and it usually is as we’re getting started. But once we’ve gotten settled on a site and added more than a certain number of friends (whatever the number is that you can keep up with easily), the conversations tend to get lost at worst, or become sketchy at best.

When DoshDosh had a friend drive on Plurk, back when Plurk first opened, I added more than 100 friends in a day and went from being able to enjoy long conversations with friends and keep up with each post, to having to MAAR (mark all as read) way more often than I’d like.

I used to love StumbleUpon’s 200 friend limit. I didn’t feel guilty about leaving people as fans because everyone knew about the limit. And with 200 or fewer friends on a site, it’s easy to develop real relationships, turning them from online friends into real life friends.

So how do you stay social as your friend list grows? I really don’t have a solid answer yet, although there are a few things I do. I’ll list those and I’d love to hear your ideas too.

1) Use private messages. A short private message from a friend, something like, “I’ve been thinking about you, how are you doing?” always makes me smile.

2) Don’t be afraid to move a conversation. Some of the best relationships I’ve developed have been because we moved the conversation off the site we were on. If you’re nervous about giving out your usual e-mail, create a social one that you can use. Chats over IM are fun and flow faster than conversations on a social site, so it’s easier to talk.

3) Are you an aural person? Use a site like Skype or consider a broadcast site where some people can type and others can call in and talk. Even though I’m more visual than aural, I have enjoyed participating in broadcasts on TalkShoe, Skype, and Stickam so far. It’s fun hearing (and sometimes seeing) who you’ve been chatting with.

So what am I missing? How do you maintain relationships as the number of friends you have increases?