The truth is that most users of networks, the vast majority of internet users are, every day more, friends of the outsider. We’re very close to someone else. Confessed remains.

Being friends with others means:

• Respect
• Admiration
• Collaboration
• mutually beneficial search
• Recommendation
• and constructive attitude

If your friend wins, you win. Friendship means commitment, a mutual commitment that each party undertakes voluntarily.

We are friends of the outsider because we respect it and share it, because we learn from the other and seek in the others the complement of the own.

We are friends of other people’s content, of other people’s knowledge, of the comments of others, of the conversations of others, of the points of view of others.

We seek other people’s opinions and other dialogues, participate in them and when we find them interesting and useful we invite others to participate as well. We share content, we cite authors, we link to sources, we give visibility to the original creators. If there’s one thing we like, it’s because we also like to say who does it. Because there is a world outside that deserves to be known, recognized and shared.

As friends of others grow and multiply, social intelligence, collective intelligence, grows and grows strong.

Thanks to the great majority of people, and therefore the vast majority of internet users, we are friends of the outsider, the Network has become a place where, against the exception of restricting, the custom and habit of sharing is imposed. That’s the main rule of play in this field. It is a simple rule, easy to understand, not always easy to implement.

The enemies of the stranger, on the contrary, who also have them and not a few, do not share, do not socialize. Enemies of others instead of opening doors close comments. They love us as readers, as followers, as consumers, but not as contributors, not as opinion contributors. There are also enemies of the outsider who copy and paste, do not ask for or exchange. They drink but they don’t give.

The closed environments, the monolithic contents, the absence of links that allow us to go out to contrast a view or expand a knowledge, the walls closed to comments, the areas strongly guarded by passwords, the accesses banned by endless forms… all of these are the hallmarks of the enemies of others.

This is not a well-meaning discourse on the values and ideals of a harmonious and perfect digital society. It is a business discourse in which we talk about the keys that allow us to establish both personal and commercial relationships because, in the end, personal and commercial relationships are only different in the type of transaction. Emotional transactions and economic transactions.

To do business it is essential that all parties involved win, each according to their expectations.

Each party expects something from the other and to get it is willing to give something in return. Business improves when both parties, or multiple parties, are friends with others. Doing business is sharing. It takes at least two parties to do business. To do business, we need others.

The very thing is limited while the outsider is hugely wide. As individuals, companies, brands or organizations, if we think only of themselves, we become small. By valuing the outsiders the horizon is wide and the world becomes great.

It is advisable and it is smart to keep in mind so as not to make good the famous quote (whose author I can not remember) which says that “in this country everyone goes to his own thing, except me, that I go to my own”.

If you like our content. Share.

Link it, sing it, use it to build your own content on it, or with it. We will be happy to be part of the ingredients with which to feed the social networks and the Great Conversation.