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Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

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Relational Reciprocity

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I don’t play with every new social media tool. In fact, I ignore most of them. I’ve decided my view is that tools are vehicles for problem solving or uniquely rare opportunities for new learning. The former I go looking for when I need them. The latter show up without warning, but are few and far between.

Once the decision is made to participate, I’m in with “both feet.” I’m a saturation learner, always have been. It shows in my 14+ years of dance training, my 8 years of theater, my 35 years of education and educational publishing … even in the way I took on blogging.

Reciprocity is Relational, Not Transactional

I’ve been exploring EmpireAvenue for one year now. The game and the sociology caught my attention and offered me something new worth exploring.

The premise of Empire Avenue is that a player buys shares in other players’ participation on social media platforms across the Internet. So at first what fascinated me was the idea of getting a more rounded picture of the people who were playing the game and what was driving them — and also what would drive me.

Soon enough the game pushed the question of reciprocity.

The way the game is engineered, the currency I spend to purchase shares in your activity doesn’t flows through to you at much less. Basically, if I buy 100 shares in you, you’ll get a deposit worth about 10 of your shares. So complete reciprocity — for you to buy 100 shares back — is nearly impossible, even if my share price is WAY less than yours.

Yet some folks hold an unrealistic expectation of reciprocity — one that hurts their own success.
Their expectations seem to me out of balance with their best interests.

The reason I invest in your activity is because your shares earn value and deliver daily dividends. If I buy you I grow and pass on that growth to my shareholders. It’s a perk if you buy my shares too.

If I wait for every winner in the game to come back to buy equal shares in me — some never will. Their share price will get higher as they grow. I’ll lose the dividends I could have been earned while I waited for some transactional reciprocity.

Who loses in that scenario?
Me … not the winners I believe are ignoring me.

It works that way in everything. If I invest in you as a person, it’s because you’re growing, you add value by who you are and what you’re doing. By investing in you, I grow too!

Reciprocity is relational. Not transactional.

Plant a seed.
Watch it grow.
Enjoy the flower.

Reciprocity is the flower — color, beauty, fragrance.
It’s not “I cared for the seed. Now the seed cares for me.”
The act of helping the seed grow provided a far more powerful payoff.

It’s the same with people.

Choose Your Winners Wisely and Invest Unconditionally

An unforgiving belief in transactional reciprocity is a skewed form of not seeing the whole picture. When we close our eyes to seeing all point of view, we defeat ourselves — or as my mom would say “Cut off own nose to spite our face.”

And you can’t smell the flowers without a nose.

So if you’ve been hoarding your attention because someone’s not paying attention to you … could be you’re at the losing end of that idea. Look for the flower in the attention you’re giving. Not the seed of attention that you think you’re owed.

Build relational reciprocity by investing in what you’re willing to grow.

Choose your winners wisely and invest in them unconditionally.

Value the resources you’re investing dearly. Then offer them without fear.
For the most important, don’t hold back the blood, sweat, and tears.

See the flowers in the seeds even before you start helping them grow.
And keep your nose.

Be irresistible.
— ME “Liz” Strauss

Lasting Relationships and 15-Second Friends — Are You a Solo in a Social Media World?

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15 Days, 15 Seconds

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At dinner last Friday with Beth Kanter, the scholar of social media and tech for nonprofits, used the phrase “a solo in a social media world.” That phrase has stuck with me. I wonder whether social media is changing the relationships I have with my friends?

Beth’s statement came at about the same time that Maki sent me to a study that explains the nature of relationships.

Some friendships are short and fleeting, while others may last years. Although a wide variety of factors go into determining the strength of our relationships, the long-lasting ones seem to share a number of the same characteristics, according to a recent study of a cell phone network.

Lasting relationships have these things in common. The most important of these is reciprocity.

  • The more often we connect with friends in a 15-day period, the stronger our relationship will be.
  • Most strong ties between two people lasted for just one 15-day interval. Only 20% of relationships lasted longer than a year.
  • The strongest factor in lasting relationships is reciprocity — returning a phone call.

It’s a simple thing. When someone calls, writes, comments, links, or asks for help, do we respond or do we let it ride? Lasting relationships last because we are persistent in nurturing them.

By knowing the characteristics of persistence, the researchers could look at the features of the network for the first 15 days, and predict what the network would look like in the future.

Now we have access to a world of online and offline relationships, but we still only have so much time for reciprocity. Does social networking put us in danger of making vast communities of fast 15-day friends — folks we meet today and hardly know in a year? Is social networking causing us to neglect the reciprocity that made our relationships last?

Social networking offers us access to start and spark incredible new relationships. People connect, relate, and do business, who would otherwise never have met. Together we accomplish, build, create, innovate, solve, fix, and nurture. Some of us even fall in love and get married. Social media can have powerful, important, and lasting effects.

BUT, a 140 character touch within 15 seconds isn’t the same as a conversation within 15 days.

Friday, Rick Wolff said, “Someday, somebody’s REALLY going to plead for help on Twitter. . . . ”

Will that tweet be recognized?

Lasting Relationships in a Social Networking World — is that the new balance we have to find?

I don’t want to be a solo in a social media world.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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