Crowd Relationship

Crowd Relationship

In the real world you have different types of connections. The very first connection is your family direct family; mother, father, sister or brother. This connections goes as far as cousins of second degree. When you grow up, you create bonds and relationships with people at school, which once again creates friendship till the second or third degree of friendship, so called friends of friends. As an adolescent you will have relationships of close bonds such as a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

Nevertheless, the choices taken in your life makes you lose friends and bonds between your relationships. If we look closely, the average person in the Western countries loses 80 % of its first relationships in his life, remaining just a small fraction of the people known. It is also a scientific fact the a person becomes more choosy when he grows up. At the adult face a person distinguishes by order of importance; family, love mates, friendship, relations, business relations and enemies.

• Family is the first circle of trust created by a person, it is limited to parents, brothers and sister, children and grandparents.
• Love mate(s), refers to love relations and its different categories, girl or boyfriend, husband or wife.
• Friendship; are generally people who play an important role in a persons life, they generally share a similar personality, background, experiences, tastes or hobbies. Here you can count some relatives such as cousins.
• Knowledge Relationships, are people who have at a distance a relationship with a person, generally those people are friends of friends of friends…. They have been in contact with the person a few times in his life, sometimes you see them often and sometimes they don’t show up for a very long time. This category can also be some sort of a place where a person puts the old friends he has not seen anymore or does not contact as often as previously.
• Business relationship, are people you work for or work with, both upwards as downwards, it can also be your teachers which basically you have done business with; they teach you, you learn, you get rewarded ! Business relations can sometimes be relations after doing business.
• Last category, but not do be dismissed are enemies, which in some cases can be really disturbing. Enemies are relations or friendships gone wrong, misjudgements and arguments are generally the basis of this rupture of this relationships.

Today the concept of relationships is at the centre of the media due to social networking sites which all together combines all this different types of relationships. People find friendship with people online, because they go to groups and networks that are somehow related to the persons feelings and personality. People find love online, they even marry thanks to the internet, business relations are created between people who perhaps never had the change to meet in real life ! only advantages folks.
The thing with social networks is, that it has created a new kind of relationship, crowd relationship.

Crowd relationships are people who work together with you in order to develop a project, a business or a home work. They help you to find a solution to a situation. Take an example of Ecademy or Linkedin:

Some people post a job by message to all his connections (most of them he or she does not know).

On Facebook, Myspace or Bebo a word to mouth message goes when someone is asking some advice on a product or a service. Crowd relationship is related to crowdsourcing where companies tend to search solutions within an extern relationships or with its clients.

In the business world, crowd relationships are becoming an emerging power of resources of business development. It strengths ties between companies and clients, in every level; B2C, B2B, etc.

There are two kinds of Crowd relationships, Under the line CR and Above the line CR:

Under the line Crowd Relationship is a more private an personal relationship with the crowd in our network. Example: you are searching for cheap flights to Barcelona and you ask your friends on Facebook if someone knows a cheap hotel in Barcelona ? Your friends may not know but they will forward your request to their friends till someone knows the answer to your problem and decides to post a message in order to help you out.

Above the line Crowd Relationship: This kind of relationship is when your network is used to resolve your work. Example: you are a recruiter and you are desperately looking for a SAP specialist, you send a message to all of your contacts on Linkedin and ask for help, who knows maybe they know someone?

The truth is that Crowd relationship is sometimes a one way relationship, only a few people respond to a request of someone they do not know. But the awareness of using those relationships are growing among companies who use so called enterprise 2.0 tools in order to profit from internal crowdsourcing. Some internet prophets are predicting that crowd relationships will be an emerging economic power to be taken very seriously.