Users in social network will typically assume one or many of social roles and relations under the communicative paradigm:
1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)
The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.
Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.
Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.
Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.
Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.
Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.
