Sometimes it’s a good idea to get involved in your friends’ social lives. Here’s why:

Social dating is a new name for an age-old practice: friends helping friends connect.

That means anyone can hand-pick people for their friends to date — and then watch what happens when they meet!

When you play wingwoman or wingman for your pals you can help them break the ice, offer dating advice, share their excitement when they meet someone new, and gab together about all the possibilities.

Whether you’re involved and you want to give your single friends a nudge to meet new people and see what happens — or you’re single and want a low-pressure, fun way to connect to new people — we think social dating makes finding a relationship fun, real, and like no other online experience.

When you Play Matchmaker^TM you get to connect your friends to people who are worthy of their attention. Plus — let’s be honest — it’s fun to see who your friends are thinking about dating.

Picture yourself at a party. You see a guy or gal across the room. S/he has a quirky grin that makes you think, “Perfect for my best friend M____.”

What’s your next step? Start chatting. Suss out whether this person merits your best pal’s affection. If what you hear sounds promising, you’ll casually mention your super-amazing, brilliant BFF who just happens to be available…

Then, when your BFF happens to walk by, you’ll introduce them. You all start talking. They start laughing. And then at some point you slip away and leave those two wrapped up in engaging conversation.

What happens next is up to them. But you’ll definitely be hearing about it. We get goosebumps just thinking about the possibilities!

Engage’s “Play Matchmaker^TM” features work just the same as this real world scenario, only the fun is multiplied across your entire social network.

With social dating, friends connect through friends they already know.

Today’s busy single people meet new people when they least expect it - at dinner parties, professional events, and friends’ weddings. And more often than not, these chance encounters start with a casual introduction from a mutual friend.

Social dating on Engage brings this playful way of making connections to the Web, together with all of the enjoyment that comes with a friend’s advice, suggestions, good judgment, and experience — so you can have fun exploring an attraction before you move to meeting offline.

Single people multiply their chances to meet someone new.

Engage makes it easy to connect to new people who are once or twice removed from your immediate social circle. That means you’re casting a wider net, but staying within a chain of people who trust each other’s recommendations and taste.

Engage also lets you connect to completely new people that your friends deem worthy for you. You or your matchmaking pals can consult another single person’s matchmaking wingpeople to find out what you have in common. If it seems like you two would be a dynamic duo, your friends can make an introduction that you’ll both welcome!

Everyone has more fun and single people get better results.

Because social dating introductions happen through real people, singles are more likely to hear back from people they’re introduced to — so they can see where an attraction goes and get a definitive outcome, instead of waiting for an email reply that never comes. Engage members are 80% more likely to reply to an email from someone they’ve met through their community, as compared to a stranger. That means less time wasted, more people to discover, and more opportunities for fun.

Social context keep things real.

Whether you meet through friends at a dinner party, connect through an old co-worker, or rediscover each other at a reunion, meeting socially gives you a preview of what someone is really like before you spend any time with that person one-on-one. Why should meeting online be any different?

With social dating on Engage you can get someone’s back story, find out what their friends love about them, and get a full picture of who they are before you decide to introduce them to someone you know or to try to connect to them yourself! Overall it’s more fun for the people who Play Matchmaker^TM and way less pressure for the people who want to date.

So in our humble opinion, it’s all good!

Hugs and kisses,
Engage

Whether you’re here to Play Matchmaker™ for single friends or to connect to new people for yourself, we ask all of our members to create a profile. Here are nine ways to make your profile stand out from the crowd!

1. Make a good first impression. Your profile is a way of introducing yourself to people. What do you want them to take away? Humor, humility, and optimism are always in style. Most people want to spend time with someone who’s upbeat and fun to be around.
2. Grab their attention with a creative headline or an interesting story. What makes you different from everyone else? What pursuits make you happy? If someone dated you, how would you want to spend time with them? Or if you fixed up friends how would you help them decide who to date?
3. Don’t complain. Mama always said, if you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all. And she’s probably right when it comes to exes. If you really feel compelled to share, your best bet is to briefly mention the bad breakup and then talk about how you’ve moved forward and turned lemons into lemonade. Or explain how your experience made you even better at Playing Matchmaker™, because now you’ve loved and learned.
4. Do be honest. One of the biggest complaints single people have about traditional online dating is that some of the profiles are kind of shady and inauthentic. With social dating everyone’s friends are on hand to keep them more honest about their age, looks, and dating history. So we can all be real here, right? Celebrate who you are!
5. Focus, people. Focus. You don’t have to throw in the kitchen sink (and the microwave and the toaster). Just mention the three or four most important qualities you bring to the party. Think about giving people enough information to discover that they have some things in common with you. Or that you sound like a great match for their cousin or coworker or neighbor. Then you can learn more about each other over time.
6. Check your spelling and get a trusted friend to edit what you’ve written. If you’re stumped about what to write, ask a friend how they would describe you to a stranger. You might be surprised at their insights about you!
7. Do take time to post a quality picture. What does that mean? Include one good head shot that’s in focus, with nice lighting. Then add extra pictures that show all the sides of your personality- on a camping trip, on the dance floor, running a half-marathon, walking your Welsh Corgi, knitting an iPod cover, hanging streamers for a charity fundraiser… Show yourself off!
8. Don’t take the picture yourself. Here’s another place where friends come in handy. You know that weird camera angle you get when you hold your arm out and shoot your own portrait? Yeah. We do too! Whether you’re here to Play matchmaker or to connect to new people yourself, it will improve your credibility to look decent in your picture.
9. Let your honesty extend to your photo. It may be tempting, but don’t post a six-year-old picture of you playing drinking games in college — no matter how sassy you look! Your friends love you for who you are now - and new people will too!

Hugs and kisses,
Engage

You use Engage. You use Facebook. You’ve got friends on both. Now you can share Engage profiles on your Facebook profile, so you can Play Matchmaker^TM even when you’re away from Engage. It’s like those old Reese’s peanut butter cup ads: “You got your Engage in my Facebook!” Delicious!

Here’s how to do it:

1. Sign in to Engage.
2. Pick a friend on Engage that you want to fix up or connect with your Facebook friends.
3. On the friend’s Engage profile, in the “More” drop-down list, select “Share to Facebook.”
4. You’ll be taken to Facebook’s sign in page and asked to write a comment about the picture.
5. Repeat until all your single friends have met someone fun and new!

What’s The Point?
To get your social network to make new connections and fix up even more of your single friends. That’s what social dating is all about!

Hugs and kisses,
Engage

Valentine’s week is always a lot of fun, and occasionally full of surprises, when you work for a social dating site. Here’s a recap of the last few days at Engage.

We Rode the Love Train

I suppose we could have been in the office working on Valentine’s morning, but where is the love in that? Instead, we took a team of Engage staff and friends, grabbed a musician armed with a few hundred love songs and headed down to the Montgomery BART station to romance some unsuspecting commuters.

We gave away just under 3,000 roses in 90 minutes and shared a little love with a lot of San Franciscans. One of them was the rather handsome Michael Singer, from InformationWeek, who was apparently feeling so much love for us that he went right to the office and posted about his Engage Love Train encounter. Of course, not everyone was feeling all warm and fuzzy about the love train, especially not Andy Wright in his post at SFWeekly.com going to throw a lot of love his way this year, and we’ll see if he comes around for next February 14th.

Just about everyone in the BART station was smiling, and a few commuters were even singing along to their favorite love song. Watch the CBS news video and feel the love for yourself.

Engage Research Made the News

Valentine’s week is always a busy press time around here. Jen Saranow at the Wall Street Journal worked with us for her “The Cut-and-Paste Personality,” piece about singles plagiarizing each other’s dating profiles. Jennifer says that a recent search at that other dating site that I helped start and run for ten years:

…brought up more than 90 profiles with such lines as: “I want an opposite. A yin to my yang,” or “You know that woman who is the first person on the dance floor at every party? That’s me.” They weren’t even from real people. They were cribbed from sample profiles posted online at E-Cyrano.com (www.e-cyrano.com) by dating coach and profile writer Evan Marc Katz. “It just seems so short-sighted,” says Mr. Katz, of Los Angeles. “Everybody steals the same lines so they are not original anymore.”

Jennifer included this Engage research in her piece:

In a recent survey of more than 400 online daters commissioned by Engage.com, 9% of respondents said they copied from another person’s profile; 15% suspect their own words were stolen.

Isn’t stealing someone else’s profile text scraping the bottom of the barrel for insight into who we are, why someone might be attracted to us, and what we’re looking for in a partner? Apparently not everyone thinks so. Meanwhile, over at the Chicago Tribune, technology writer Wailin Wong looked at the growing confusion regarding how we should use technology and social networks in our romantic lives:

In simpler times, a high school ring was all it took to signal the start of a relationship. And when the breakup came, who would know or care if one tucked away a few mementos?

All that has changed in the digital era, in which millions of people chronicle the real-time, intimate details of their lives on social networking Web sites like Facebook.com. Dating may be no more or less complex than ever, but because gossip about who’s got a new boyfriend or girlfriend — and who just lost one — now travels instantaneously to a large network of contacts, a new relationship minefield has emerged.

Wailin used some new Engage research in her story “What’s Your Status? Relationships Revealed Online.”

McDermott’s advice is to remember that relationships involve people, not machines. Strange as that sounds, Engage.com conducted a survey of more than 600 single adults in the U.S. and found 21 percent said it was OK to say “I love you” for the first time in an e-mail or text message. Only 12 percent said it was acceptable to break up electronically.

Valentine’s Surprises

Over at About.com’s Weird News Buck Wolf reported that:

In Kansas, a woman carrying flowers and a box of candy walked into a bank and told the teller that the box contained a bomb. She demanded an undisclosed sum, and after she left, x-rays shows the chocolates contained nothing more dangerous than nougat.

Buck also mentioned that 8 million Americans probably sent themselves Valentine’s presents this year. If we had known, we would have given them a rose!

Hugs, kisses and warm romantic wishes this love week from all of us…
Trish McDermott
VP of Love, Engage

Have You Thanked Your Matchmaker Lately?

Fourteen days to Valentine’s Day, and right about this time happy, and not-so-happy, couples, are navigating a media blitzkrieg of rose and champagne reminders of what love and happily-ever-after are supposed to be all about—namely diamonds, if you believe what you see on TV.

Singles, on the other hand, are doing their best to ignore the global mating call to action—the corporately-manufactured drive to fill that empty spot and cross over to the land of the happily-coupled with their future special someone. Someone whom they actually have yet to meet, but should be fully prepared to shop for, all in a matter of days.

At its worst, Valentine’s Day is an unavoidable reminder of the love we may be missing in our lives, or an unhappy obligation to purchase a little peace in our life with our partner. We get it all wrong when we let dollars be the currency of our commitment to each other.

At its best, Valentine’s Day is about small gestures and thoughtful acknowledgments that say, “None of us are in this alone. And all of us are better by virtue of the people who love us, and the people we love.” We get it right when we reach out and connect with these people, even when they aren’t romantic partners.

February 13th is “Thank Your Matchmaker Day”

Look behind half of all couples celebrating Valentine’s Day this year and you’ll find a friend who in some way nudged, cajoled, or meddled (and I mean that in the best possible way) to help that happy couple find each other. Yes, half of all marriages in the United States are the result of someone playing matchmaker for the couple, according to Engage research of more than 1,000 married adults.

As I write this, many thousands of people are using Engage to help their single friends connect with other eligible singles. Friends play matchmaker on Engage, and in the real world, not because they are paid to do so, but because it’s fun and because they care. Matchmakers are the unrecognized masterminds of great dates, love affairs, and marriages. Yet when was the last time any of us took a minute to say “Thanks!”?

Engage first declared February 13, 2006 “Thank Your Matchmaker Day,” in an effort to honor these behind-the-scenes heroes of love. Before any of us celebrate Valentine’s Day, let’s take a moment to thank the intrepid matchmakers who have helped us find love already or who are committed to helping us connect with someone special soon.

While many of us will be thanking female BFFs, sisters, and mothers on February 13th, more and more, men are stepping up to help make love a reality for their friends. On Engage, half of all people playing matchmaker are men—something even we didn’t expect when were building the site.

Famous Couples and the Men Who Played Matchmaker For Them

Joe Simpson, reported to have persuaded Jessica Simpson to dump Nick Lachey two years ago, played matchmaker this year when he introduced his daughter to Dallas Cowboy, Tony Romo. For everyone other than some Cowboys fans, the relationship seems to be working.

Seems like Jessica and Tony are happy they met!

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones should take time on February 13th to thank Antonio Banderas, who introduced the two at a dinner he gave.

Rosie O’Donnell’s brother Daniel O’Donnell deserves kudos for introducing his sister to her life partner, Kelli Carpenter.

Rosie and Kelly met when Rosie’s brother played matchmaker.

Christina Aguilera was introduced to her husband, Jordan Bratman, by her manager, Irving Azoff. Now they have a new baby boy to think Irv for, too!

Christina Aguilera met her hubby through a friend’s introduction.

The Hard Knocks School of Matchmaking

In Chinese, the character that represents “matchmaker” happens to also be a homonym for “bad luck.” That may be one reason why not all matchmaking stories have happy endings — especially for the matchmaker. One professional matchmaker in China was sued when he denied his client’s request for an “Ugly Girl Refund”. The courts eventually ruled that the matchmaker had to return half of the fee he had collected from his client’s mother.

An old custom in China had brides crying and yelling during their weddings. Apparently the idea was to make false claims of grievances and sorrows, which would in turn guarantee marital bliss. But sometimes, the grievances and sorrows were actually true. Some brides publicly cried about and cursed their matchmakers, during their weddings, especially when they had little say in their choice of groom.

Every tear shed over an unfortunate match can be trumped by a true love story, inspired by a friend’s human intuition and gut feelings about how two people just might pair up. Although NY Times reporter John Tierney wrote this week about the “algorithms of love” social scientists are peddling on some leading dating sites, it shouldn’t take an advanced degree or fancy mathematics to sense that two people might be right for each other, or to do a good deed. Tierney would like to hear your online matchmaking success story.

We’d prefer to watch you thank the matchmakers in your life. Just add your video to our collection of “thank you” messages on our Thank Your Matchmaker YouTube group. While you’re at it, pay you matchmaker’s good deeds forward by playing matchmaker for singles you know. You might forever change two lives.

On a personal note: Marion, thanks for helping me find the love of my life. I promise you’ll never hear me cry, complain, or swear about that!

Trish McDermott
VP of Love, Engage

It’s that time of year where you can’t go anywhere without hearing the V word. (No, not “vajayjay,” silly… though we’re hearing that everywhere too.) We meant Valentine’s. For some, that word cues a symphony. For others, it cues the screeching violins from “Psycho”.

Don’t get us wrong, we love little candy hearts as much as the next gal or guy! But sometimes it feels like we all have to participate in Valentine’s Day’s chocoholic excesses. Whether you’re between relationships, dating someone new, or with a longtime companion, all the hearts and arrows and romantic formulas can get a little stale, right? Romance is so much more, well… romantic when it’s not calendared in.

Why not take a more social approach to V-Day? Here’s one recipe for a St. V’s without the Hallmark holiday hangover:

• Host a party where you and your friends can get gorgeous and mingle – without paying for a prix fixe menu or being sardined into banquette seating with three gazillion other couples.
• Invite everyone you know – involved or not.
• Ask everyone to make up a signature cocktail and bring the ingredients to your place.
• Tell your involved friends to bring a single friend or two along with them.
• While you’re mixing cocktails, see how your single friends blend!

Will love be served up, shaken not stirred? You’ll have to wait and see. At least you and your best friends can have a gala evening together, whether or not Cupid decides to strike. And If you’re between sweeties, your best friends are the best people to be with!

Gee… someone should throw a fun party like that online. Oh wait, we did.

Hugs and kisses,

Engage

p.s. Be sure to tell us about your party. Post a comment to this blog entry and let us know how your soirée turns out!