We are social animals. We love company, especially of our peers and friends. We thrive on relationships.

And in a digital era where electrons govern most of our behavior, work and even leisure, it isn’t surprising we are increasingly relying upon digital tools to further our relationships.

But are we doing it the right way? Effectively? To benefit everyone involved?

As the tools to extend our social connections get more versatile, powerful and ubiquitous, it is worth looking at how we can build relationships using digital tools.

Let’s start with relationships. What exactly are they?

We have many different kinds of relationships. And they are defined in multiple ways.

By their nature, we have personal, business, social and professional relationships.

Some are intimate, others close and warm, many casual and the rest neutral.

Depending on circumstances (or choice), some relationships are short, some long, a few life-long and the rest fall somewhere in between.

Based on what governs and underlies these relationships, they may be described as financial, emotional, built on common interests, geographic (by where we live and work) or by birth (family and social).

And we can also group relationships by behavior of the principals - where one or the other party gives or receives, or where there is reciprocal, mutual advantage for everyone in the relationship.

One last way to categorize relationships is by frequency of interaction - daily, regularly, occasionally or rarely.

And because today a lot of this relationship building happens (or is continued) online, digital tools go a long way in helping with the process.

Digital tools are valuable for:

- Enriching quality of relationships. VOIP, even in its very primitive phase in early 2000, helped connect my daughter (who was then 2 years old) with my parents while we lived in London, U.K. It also saved me a small fortune in phone bills, as the little imp spun yarns for hours on end as doting grandparents clung eagerly onto every word!

- Streamlining efficiency. Life would be hard to imagine without my contact list or email address book. Online networks let me communicate with friends, business contacts and far-flung family members, and do it instantly, inexpensively and effortlessly. So much so that it becomes a major hassle these days to lick an envelope, stick a stamp on it, write an address and drop it into a mailbox… actions that were commonplace just a few years back.

- Avoiding forgetfulness. With a memory like mine, I say a regular prayer of thanks for reminder services and autoresponders. Do these reminders salvage, even deepen, relationships? You bet!

- Personalizing relationships. Mass customization allows me to draft a more or less generic message, and then tweak it to fit each recipient, even do it semi-automatically. Acknowledgement on an individual level is critical to loyal, strong relationships - and technology and tools allow a degree of personalization that would be hard to achieve, if not impossible, without these tools.

- Making relationships more profitable. I come at this from the standpoint of an online direct marketer who thrives on developing value-adding relationships with clients. By giving me multiple channels and media to reach out and connect with an otherwise scattered audience across the globe, tools like Twitter and my blog have made my e-relationships many times more profitable.

- Simplifying and speeding things up. Online dating services are just one example. Recently I used social media tools to find my cousin a bride - the wedding will happen soon. Vive la online relationship building tools!

- Segregating and classifying contacts. Tools like Facebook and MySpace let you build relationships with a vast potential audience - and yet keep each sub-set segregated and unique from others who share a different kind of relationship with you. Virtual profiles, personas and ‘personal brands’ let you foster different levels of relationships virtually - and keep them distinct from others, if you so wish to.

And in these (and many other) ways, digital tools help relationship building. But it’s tempting and easy to confuse technology with its effective deployment, and blur the line between using the tools and achieving an end result by using them.

To a technophile, the process may get more exciting and fulfilling than even the purpose or target s/he initially set out to reach!

That’s why it’s worth remembering that:

Tools HELP build relationships - they are not themselves the relationship!

For too many ‘marketing minded’ individuals, the size of their MySpace network or Twitter followers or Facebook contact group seems an important measure of their ’success’ with social media use. Just as your bank balance is a poor index (taken in isolation) of your ’success’ in life, your network size alone isn’t reflective of your relationships.

Tools HELP nurture relationships - they cannot create them on auto-pilot!

That means YOU have to choose to invest the time and effort into using the tools, instead of dreaming about automating your relationship management. Just as you can’t hope to build a network of friends from an automated outbound telephone calling campaign, you can’t hope to grow relationships using a MySpace adder-bot.

Tools HELP extend relationships - they will not replace them!

I’ll have my email autoresponder reply to yours, and then my blog can ping yours. We’ll have a great relationship that way. Right?

I know. It sounds absurd. Yet many folks look at social media that way. Gatecrash, set up ’systems’ and then hope for ‘relationships’ to flourish. Ain’t gonna happen, sorry.

Building relationships using digital tools is a science, and an art. And it takes committment, dedication and a certain flair or style to maximize the value you can derive from it all.

What do you think is your current level of ‘exploiting’ the power in digital tools for your relationship building efforts, online and off?

How do you use digital tools in regular day to day life, business or personal?

Where do you see the future breakthroughs happening when it comes to implementing technology in relationship growing?

If you lose all access to digital tools, how will your relationships look like?

What changes do you plan to make, going forward?

Thanks to Chris Brogan for sparking off this line of thought with his list of 100 topics for PodCamp.