The proliferation of people, profiles, communities, networks and blogs kind of reminds me of the game “Where’s Waldo?”.

The “Where’s Waldo?” series was an optical illusion game where the objective was to find Waldo amongst a collage of other images. Amongst all the images was a skinny guy with a red striped shirt and hat wearing glasses. To find Waldo you had to focus you eyes and your mind on his image amongst the clutter of other images. Sound familiar?

With over 700 million people, over 60 million blogs, thousands of social networks and everyone saying something about everything one must wonder if we are all like Waldo buried in a sea of “connections and communications”.

Is It An Optical Illusion?

If we blog we follow our traffic to see how many are reading our post. If we are on Twitter or Friendfeed we check and see how many people are following us. If we post in “social media” communities we check how many have read our post or voted on it. If we are in any social network we watch the number of connections we have collected. If your a business you get obsessed with the monthly financials hoping that your revenue and profit is growing. Whether it is our business or our “virtual presence” if the numbers aren’t what we wanted or expected then we try different things for the purposes of creating better numbers.

Numbers can be very misleading and whatever meaning we want to put on the numbers it could be an optical illusion leading us to believe that we’re doing the right things and doing things right. The power of the social web comes in numbers but like everything else the numbers mean different things.

Whether your a business or an individual, getting readers or collecting connections is easy as long as you know the “tricks of the trade“. The number of readers and connections doesn’t equate to much more than traffic, a number. While having lots of traffic ensures better search engine positioning it doesn’t ensure relationships, just traffic.

The same rule applies to business customers. Having a lot of customers doesn’t insure a relationship, just a lot of customers. Some of which may not be satisfied but if you’ve “locked them in” their just unsatisfied customers.

What About a Market of Relationships?

A market is not a market without people. Unless people create transactions a business cannot sustain. Transactions are the result of establishing relationships with people. Once established the people want to be treated as people, not numbers. Business is a supply chain of people where everyone is serving someone, or at least they should be.

While you and your business may not be difficult to find you will be known by your relationships which are more than numbers. What improves the bottom-line, satisfies the markets, create shareholder wealth and helps us achieve our personal objectives,

relationships.

So What is your number should be How are your relationships. Like Waldo you wouldn’t find where your relationships are unless you can train your eyes and mind to see that what is behind every number is people. By the way, the people are everywhere and they have been empowered to create united relations about everything and anything.

Is it a numbers game or relationships? In could be both but Socialutions requires an emphasis on relationships first.

Get it?