Of course, some have taken it well beyond blogging on A|R and have included Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Trulia, Zillow, Flickr, Blip.fm… and a million other sites and communities.

But the same question is always at the bottom of it…

just out of sight of some, and front and center for others…

WHY?

What is the purpose?

• To ‘close’ sales
• To make money
• To grow our business
• To get back in touch with old friends
• To make new friends
• Lookin’ for Love…

These are the answers I usually hear… but they all entail one thing.  To meet people… and to build relationships.  Regardless of what else you might be trying to accomplish on the list, it comes down to meeting people, building relationships and leveraging those relationships to fulfill the goals of each and every person involved.

Seriously, what else on that list can be accomplished without meeting people… probably face to face… and building relationships?

I have had the great fortune to meet a lot of Active|Raindrops.  Some that are no longer active in the rain, others that are very active.  I have been able to hang out with some of the famous and the infamous.  On FaceBook I have been blessed to get re-acquainted with many of my (I thought) long-lost friends, as well as get to know a lot of new friends.

But there should always be a goal…

And raw numbers are not the goal…  I can’t have meaningful relationships with 50,000 people.  And there are a lot of people that I really don’t want or need to know… and a LOT more than really don’t want or need to know me.

Do I really want or need 53,000 followers on Twitter?  If I had 10% of that, could I actually interact with them, or would I filter out all of these “new friends” so that I could concentrate on people I knew?

So, is that the goal?  Should we be trying to build a following of thousands of people just to broadcast messages to them, but not engage in two way conversation? Not that there is anything wrong with that… I have a FaceBook ‘Fan Page’ that I started to put up even before Mike Mueller and Dustin Luther told me to… and I think it is a GREAT idea.  But there is a major difference.

If we are friends on FaceBook or if we are mutual followers on Twitter, we expect that the conversation is two way. If we are fans of a FaceBook ‘Fan Page’ we expect that to be a one way broadcast.

Do I have all of the answers?

Heck No… I don’t even have all of the questions.  I do have a questioning nature, though.  And I like to go against the grain.  And popular notions often strike me as something to question.

And I’m one to talk…  I am following 1000 people or so on Twitter.  I have over 600 ‘friends’ on FaceBook… and I don’t actually know some of them.  I have started getting more picky about who I friend or follow, and on my local Twitter account, I only follow people that are in my immediate area… but the fact remains that I am not the poster boy.

But I am starting to put together the questions…