Let's Fall In Love (Or Hook-Up, Or Pillow-Fight, Or... Whatever) Online

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Like thousands of people around the country this month, my friend Gina re-activated her dating site profile this January.

“New year, new start!” she said, excitedly, puffing on a cigarette as we cruised the PCH with the top down, the cool winter breeze blowing through our hair. “I'm doing this new thing, too, called 'sober dating.'”

“Not drinking on dates?” I asked.

“No, no,” she corrected me quickly. “Slow, cold-headed dating. It's called sober because you don't get drunk on the person, you just go and spend a few hours together, then you go home. It's about pacing yourself, not getting all caught up.”

“Why wouldn't you want to get caught up?” I asked. “Isn't that the best part?”

“Because they might not be that into you,” she replied.

“Oh, but why would you go out with them to begin with if they weren't?”

Gina looked at me like I was crazy. And without context, I can't say I blame her.

My friend Geoff Brown, who heads Los Angele's Social Media Club calls my online dating style “The Long Tail Pick Up.” A long tail is a sales concept that refers to the sales of items in small quantities that suit the interest of a more refined audience, which over a period of time can accumulate to take a larger market share than hot must-haves on the market.

“Imagine the business cycle of a video game,” he explains. “The game initially sells then settles at a medium number of sales and continues at that level over a long period of time. Original product life cycle is a spike up and then a sharp decline, then another bump and another decrease, so when you're talking about a long tail, you're talking about something that's in demand, but for a longer amount of time. It's not a hard sale, you're not going to close the deal it right away. You have the opportunity to take the first step, get your foot on the door, and go from there.”

What I do, essentially, is make myself available over different non-dating-specific networks and distribute my content that way, accumulating users in these networks who are like-minded, or who at the very least find my contributions valuable.

INFILTRATION MARKETING

“Catching the eye of the Flox is an arduous process,” my friend Jack joked when I called him to ask. “I was direct messaging you on Twitter for months, then e-mailing back and forth for six months before you finally agreed to go hang with me.”

By interacting with a stream of content, people don't just get a snapshot of me taken at any single point in time, craftily devised to make me appear more awesome than I am. They get my work, my neuroses, my obsessions, my interests, the way I communicate with friends, the frequency I cuss, a peek into what I do and eat—everything. Even when it's 140 characters at a time, the entirety of the stream provides more than a single profile page could.

My profile photo is a professional shot, but because I upload mobile photos, people who browse my streams get to see the more natural side of me, as well. But the emphasis isn't really on looks the way that it tends to be on dating sites: it's on content. To get my attention, to even get a follow-back on Twitter, you have to publicly message me and engage with my content.

“The conversion point is different,” says Geoff. “The old saying used to be that women make up their minds in the first ten seconds of seeing a guy. Now it's a longer decision period that has a lot more information. It may lead to people being attracted to one another for the right reasons.”

By using a network not designed specifically for dating, I am essentially forcing a more conventional form of interaction. Call it wooing, if you like. I do.

MARKET PENETRATION

No column about online dating would be complete without a sojourn into some of the most popular sites on the web. With that in mind, I jumped on Match.com and eHarmony.

Match presented me with a lot of questions: basics such as relationship status, gender, what I'm looking for, how far I am willing to go to get it, height, body type, eye and hair color, sports and exercise I like, stuff I do in my free time, favorite cities, smoking and drinking habits, job, children and whether I want any, my ethnicity, my religion, what charities I am drawn to, what comedians I think are funny, what