And I’m not the first one to ask it. However, I can’t avoid not to. I started paying bills over the Internet back in 1996. I know I was an early adopter. This was at the same time every company, big and small all pilgrimed to the ”New way of marketing”. Everyone wanted to have their own web page. Loads of money were put into having ”the best” or the ”flashiest” web. Today we’ve learned that it’s more worth to have a web page with just your contact info on rather than having the ”flashiest” web. Focus today is more on converting visitors into buying customers.

Some time ago I attended ”The Tendecy Day” arranged by the Swedish Marketing Federation. One of the speakers was Susan Fournier, Professor of Marketing and Deans’s Research Fellow at Boston University. She spoke on the topic ”Relation”. She meant that many brands and companies has focused on a partnership or marriage if you so want with their customers. Still, so many of us do not want that and we tend to forget that the marriage has a given set of rules. She lifted the preffered term ”Friend”.

”- Let’s be friends!”

The friendship has a whole different touch to it with a different set of rules, friendship places greater demands on the brand. It’s more mutual and in one sense, that suits us better. Why? Let’s have a short look.

Today every company with some sort of self esteem seems to be on their way into facebook and all the other social media that’s out there, if they’re not already there. We’ve all seen the campaigns to ”Like”. And we are all getting quite tired of it… Sometimes we seem to be so desperate to get people to ”Like” us so what was meant as a good intent comes out wrong. You’ll find some examples here.

I read a blog quite a while ago that lifted the whole phenomenon ”Like us”, ”Follow us” or ”Share this”. Oskar Dahlbom wrote in his blog: ”Why should I?” followed up with ”Don’t tell me what to do!” (you’ll find the blog here). Worth a thought isn’t it? If you, as Susan Fournier suggests, want to make friends, would you run around and and shout out to the whole world to ”Like” you? I know I wouldn’t…

So let’s try to be adults about this whole ”Like” phenomenon. Let’s leave it up to one another to decide who to ”Follow”, ”Like” and ”Share”. If something is good enough it will be ”Liked” and ”Shared”. And maybe then we can focus on becoming friends instead of trying to drown everbody with our own message. Friendship is a two way street, isn’t it?

//Daniel Bergqvist