There
are two types of relationships; those that take years of time and effort to
build and those that do not.
Relationships
require you to invest focused effort and dedicated quality time, and they
include your best friend, your family, your best clients and your close work colleagues.
In these relationships, you compromise, make sacrifices and invest emotional
capital. That’s why it hurts when a great work colleague leaves the firm or
your son moves out of the house and goes off to college. Or, that’s why, when
you make a mistake, you can call up your client and say “I’m sorry – it won’t happen again.” And because they trust you, they
give you a second chance.
Relationships
take virtually no effort at all and include the guy who sells you your train
ticket every morning, the security guard downstairs, or the barista who serves
you your mid-morning coffee at Starbucks. Even though she writes your name on
the cup, it’s still a Type II Relationship. Sure, you exchange brief
pleasantries and a smile of recognition, but that’s about it. If a different
person serves you coffee tomorrow, you probably won’t even notice. Same for the
train ticket guy. That’s how a Type II Relationship works.
Type
II Relationships also include your relationship with any of the myriad online
social networking platforms you care to think of – Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn or Instagram. At one level, these Type II
Relationships are different to the one with the guy at Starbucks. For a start,
you would certainly notice if Twitter or Facebook vanished overnight. But
that’s not the comparison I am making. The Type II similarity relates to the
ease with which you can break the relationship you have with the social media
platform.
If
it makes an error of judgement, you’re gone. Bye Bye, Farewell. Adios.
Instagram – the online photograph-sharing social media platform of global choice.
Having enjoyed insane success (insofar as being bought for a billion dollars
when there are only 13 employees in a 20 month old firm constitutes success); yesterday,
they amended their Terms
and Conditions to allow themselves to sell their users’ pictures without
their permission:
Turns
out that wasn’t such a great idea:
Now it gets interesting. Here is the Founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom,
on Dec 5 2012, explaining how Instagram had 25,000 users on its first day and soared to a 100 million users when FB bought the firm.
“I honestly do feel that it’s going very, very well…” (Minute 11).
the thing. The guys who dreamt up that “smart idea” forgot that Type II Relationships
are very easy to make, but (this is the important bit) they are just as easy to
break. If you can grow to 25,000 users overnight, you can lose them all again in
a day. Same goes for a 100 million Type II relationships.
the firestorm, and maybe too late in the game, Messrs Systrom and Zuckerberg
finally figured out how Type II Relationships work:
But. Once
you trash a Type II Relationship, it’s usually hard to win it back again:
It looks like
Kevin Systrom is in for a long week…
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