I have written many articles on how important it is to build a reputation on social media platforms. In my post last week - Netocracy - New beginnings - Are you ready I even showed that we all have the chance to start over and build a new reputation from scratch without having this reputation linked to anything we have done during our lives. It is our choice who we want to be.

During the process of building a reputation on this platform, I made wonderful new friends and hope to make many more friends from all over the world. The most amazing thing which I recently picked up is that when you speak to anybody on the platform, you do not even know if they are male or female.

For example, if you speak to somebody using their steemit name, like Hive account@serioustruth, Hive account@steemist, Hive account@liberosist, Hive account@kyriacos or whatever you’re the steemit handle might be, there is no personal information available about the person on the other side. You do not know, which country they are from, which race, which gender, age or nothing more than the name that they chose. We can now choose our online friends based on our own topic of interests. We can actually meet like-minded people and make friends.

I find this very exciting and fascinating as many of the day-to-day problems we face, are not even part of the equation. I mean stuff like feminism or racism, are just a two of the things, that will not exist for quite some time on this platform as a result, as this is not considered in the response. You are just typing a message to another digital friend, somewhere in the world. We are speaking with our digital personalities if I can call it that. In one of the comments of my Netocracy post, Hive account@onetree mentioned that his digital personality is exactly the same as his real life personality. I hope that most of us are like this as well :)

I read a few studies about online communication and found a few interesting facts which I would like to share:

There are no more strangers

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Long ago, before there was even a term like marketing coined, we had a very limited source of information. People's lives were limited to the places they stayed and their surroundings. Then came things like Radio, TV and mass media exploded. These new media's has created the ability of exposure beyond the normal media things like newspapers etc.
It was however still a professional top down approach … as in the early days of radio and TV, there wasn't things like phone in conversations.

Influence Economy

The beginning of a revolution, and in the early days things like bulletin boards and Chat rooms like ICU was the norm. The web evolved and we blogging, Social Networks, photo and video sharing are the norm. Where we are now is that the web are driven by the people and users. They are able to share their thoughts and it is increasingly easier to share our opinions. More importantly we are cultivating our ability to influence. In my opinion, it might be the democratisation of influence without even trying to do so. I am busy writing an article about The influence economy, which will be done in the next day or so, please follow me should you be interested to read.

Never before have we had so many sources of influence, most of the influencers are actually complete strangers. The result is there for an influence economy, which is a very good thing as it forces transparency, openness and honesty about our products and people as we are the products in the Steemit case for that manner.

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The study I read, which had involvement from 29 countries, believe that in the new influencer landscape, there are 5 fundamental aspects that needs t be acknowledged.

We now have digital friends as well.

We can have friends across the world, and we do not have to have face to face relationships.

Anyone can be influenced by anyone

There are no strangers anymore, we will probably trust anybody just as much as we trust our closer friends

New super influencers will rise above the masses

Not all influencers are equal, maybe I should use the statement, that all influencers are equal but some are more equal than others.

Everybody is now an influencer

Our lives are not based on the old top down influencing. We all have the ability to influence, not only the experts. We all have a say.

The influencer ecosystem has permanently changed

There is a new level of trust and truth. Although we each have a new reputation, we should not lose this reputation. Be honest, open and truthful…

As I am using blogging as a primary medium of communication with my new digital friends, I thought the stats below will be a good indication on how people from around the world see the importance of blogging and social network.

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Final Thought

We have a saying here that [Insert friend name here] is really a good friend as I can call him anytime in the middle of the night or even 03:00 in the morning when I have a flat tire. I know he will come to help. My question to you:

What will the new question or statement be in the digital friendship world?

I am sure Hive account@omfedor is a good friend, but he will be a bit pissed off when I phone him at 03:00 in the morning to come and help me to fix my tire as he lives in Russia and I live in South Africa.

Happy Steeming

Study Source - Universal McCann

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Digital Friends - There are no more strangers