The "Fall in Love" and "Now I Know You" Effects

I read a lot of blogs. Starting from the ones in my reader, and fanning out to the ones my friends and friends of friends recommend on FriedFeed. I tend to follow the links of those who link to me - when Technorati has a good day - and those recommended by the writers I enjoy in their posts. You get the idea.

Having had exposure to people before blogging, I've come to understand and recognize what I call the fall in love and now I know you effects. The first one is inspired by a brand new source of content. Wow, I got here from who can remember what search or link, but boy, am I glad I did! Lots of enthusiasm and promises of never ending, daily reading.

Attracting new readers, customers, employees, that can be an exhilarating adventure in the short term.

Then a few weeks - in some cases, days - go by, the exploration continues in earnest, and sometimes the overwhelm starts to set in, and you have the now I know you feeling. The posts are not what they used to be, I already know all that stuff, there is so much more out there to explore. Yes, we even start taking ourselves for granted.

This happens because our brain loves novelty. We are built to notice all that is different and new. It was included in the sticker price with survival instincts. Not an optional. And as we start learning and growing, we feel the need to move on to higher, better ground - whatever that may be.

Retaining readers' attention, customers spend, commitment and energy from employees, all this can be a challenge in the long term.

What happens is that we develop a relationship of giving and taking with someone through their content. As Toru Sato writes in his psychology book The Ever Transcending Spirit, when we have this relationship of giving and taking, the relationship we are experiencing is not directly with that person. It's in our mind. (It's a fast read, I recommend it.)

Sato states that learning and growth put us in a constant process of rebuilding our self-system. When we are in "The Zone", this process occurs so fast that the boundary between accepting what is happening and taking action is undetectable. In interpersonal relationships, this is what people experience as like-minded, being on the same wavelength.

You might know the concept of being in The Zone from sports. You might also be familiar with the work of Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi on "Flow". Some of the characteristics of flow are important to this conversation on the "falling in love" effect:

• your attention is completely absorbed by the activity
• the activity you engage in is perceived to have a goal or direction
• you are open to clear and immediate feedback
• you experience a sense of control as active participants in the process
• you lose self-consciousness
• you lose sense of time

Think about some of the new and fun endeavors you engage in and you will discover that they meet many of these characteristics. What happens when this turns into "now I know you" may be the sense of overwhelm. You start to gain your sense of self as separate from the activity or task, your mind is wrestling with too many things.

One of the ways to deal with overwhelm is to break down a task into smaller, manageable steps. This is probably why micro-blogging is so appealing. You break down content, impressions, and interactions into small chunks. Now you can regain control for shorter bursts. I've seen many say Twitter fits better with their daily routines, for example.

Brands, companies, people all wrestle with the same issue - how do we retain and build on relationships when we're not new, sometimes not even improved anymore?

Have you noticed how there is a constant need to define and redefine our reality? Discovering new presentations of similar concepts in blog posts, new versions of products that were already in the marketplace, reinventing what it means to be on Twitter or to blog, even reinventing our careers, personas, and space, which is something that North Americans have a bit more practice doing compared to Europeans.

These are all types of communications.

According to Sato, communication is a continuous process of breaking down and rebuilding our self-esteem. People change. People's circumstances change. People's desires change. In order to keep any relationship working, we need to be constantly open to those changes and adjust accordingly each moment we interact.

That's why you cannot really engineer a viral marketing campaign, but you may be able to create content that could go viral.

It sure sounds like social media is allowing many more to scale these dynamics so that they map to the way we're built. As you blog, market, retain employees and customers, consider that relationships unfold in stages, from the "fall in love" to the "now I know you" and everywhere in between and build that into your processes and plans.

I leave you with some beautiful quotes from Soto's book (attributed to native tribes, in translation):

"Creation is ongoing."

"The greatest strength is gentleness."

"Do not point the way, but lead the way."

"If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself."

"He who has great power should use it lightly."

"Life is both giving and receiving."

[image by peter carr, via Adam Singer]

Comments

[Suyog Mody]

Great post! I've always made the connection between doing something new and getting bored of it after a while (once the shine is gone). To get over the this-is-boring hump, i've always tried to break it down to micro tasks. The part that is intriguing is the connection between micro-tasks and micro-blogging.

This could also mean that the reason more people are not journalists is because they cant finish their piece, starting is easy...

[Bruce Christensen]

The greater part of LOVE is Passion. My wife Sarah and I have been married for 33-years and we continue to find new things to be passionate about. We are still passionate about our children, each other and our memories. But this new social media has created a passion for participation and creation. Our participation in the conversation is renewing us and giving us connections with great people who we would never meet in real life. We love the passion that this media expresses and we only hope our Fall in Love will result in Now I Know You.
Soto is correct; Life is both giving and receiving.

[Daniel J. Pritchett]

I really like this post. I'm going through a bit of social media disillusionment this quarter and it helps to understand the psychological underpinnings.

[Lew]

Valeria,

Like Daniel, I, too, am asking difficult questions regarding social media from a business perspective. I wouldn't call it disillusion as much as a need in business to always question what we do and why we do it.

For me, when I find myself in a place where familiarity is breeding contempt (or merely boredom), I take a break from it or I write about it. In the blog world, I stop reading familiar bloggers for a while and find when I return to them that my initial interest in their thoughts is either renewed or not, resulting in a temporary resolution of my ambivalence.

[Stephen Denny]

Valeria: sometimes you arrive at the "fall in love" moment with a person or a brand or any type of shiny new thing and then you realize that you've known them for more than half of your life. That's Flow in life and I realize it all the time.

How we do this professionally, with customers or clients or anyone, has more to do with consistency of purpose and less to do with "change" than we often think. When we consistently retain our purpose - to add value, to be "about solving their problems instead of talking about us all the time" - in our communications and our actions, we keep these important relationships alive. When we decide we're hip, cool, and transient, people continue to window shop.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Suyog - the reason why so many take up to Twitter may be because it allows them to literally take small steps. Yes, starting a blog, for example, is easy. It's the keeping up part that gets interesting to keep fresh.

@Bruce - the hard part will be to maintain that spirit of newness and discovery through participation with social media. Because we get used to being out there, talking with and meeting new people all the time, things take on a different perspective.

@Daniel - we also have a harder time dealing with so much change coming at us that is not voluntary. These activities where we want to embrace change become secondary as there already is so much in our lives we need to deal with. All is well in good times, it's during harder times that we really test out resolve in many things. And I see signs of stress in the 'sphere.

@Lewis - hard to argue with scant evidence, isn't it? People may want to hang out with you, but will they buy from those activities? It's healthy to want to distance yourself from things known and experience new things. That's why pauses are good between talk, notes, and anything that runs the risk of running us, instead of us being thoughtful about it.

@Stephen - I really like what you said here. Flow is when it comes natural and you retain "consistency of purpose". That has probably been my one thing throughout my career - and life - that has kept me from raising up quickly, but is keeping me very much on course. Like very marathon runner, I like to pace myself. It's easier to deal with what comes at you if you're anchored in purpose.