Strengthening Weak Ties

My question of the day: how can we fast-track bonding with a person we know we have a lot in common with? What’s the ratio of small talk to total beers to pub nights to common interests? Can we fast forward past the small talk (while not skipping the beers?)

A twist on that, I realize, is the question: how do we strengthen our weak ties?

I like this analysis: A weak tie is the start of any social relationship, while a strong tie requires community, which is typically held together not by the social network but by the shared interest (and of course the tribal leader(s)).

Family and proximity through location may throw a bit of a wrench in that, but lets just assume they constitute a shared interest.

Dunbar’s Number states that we are cognitively limited in the number of stable social relationships we can have: somewhere around 150. That apparently was the max size of our community in the early days (of mankind, not of facebook ;) )

Facebook of course pushes the edge that, as our average friend count is more than double that. I’m pushing a thousand friends, every single one of whom I can name the community we are (or were) a part of.

In Dunbar’s terms, Mike, whom I haven’t spoken to since High School almost certainly is not a ‘stable social relationship.’ He is, however, certainly a ‘weak tie,’ and arguably a strong one at that.

If I wanted to strengthen that tie, historically I would need to move back home to Colorado. Now the opportunity to strengthen is a click away, and the level of passive or low-touch interaction available on our networks makes a lot of grey space between ‘weak tie’ and ‘strong tie.’

Even a click away, the effort currently feels to great. What would I say? What will he say? What will we talk about, that’s not just reminiscing, strengthening our weak tie, but not creating a new thread that pushes us to a stronger tie?

That’s the follow-up question today. So how can we virtually strengthen a weak tie?