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By Shally Steckerl
Online social networking provides you with a venue to connect with
people whom you already know, grow your relationships and find new
people connected to you by a common contact. Effective utilisation of
your personal network is no longer a competitive advantage, it is a
survival tool.
Although the hackneyed phrase 'it's who you know' has been abused by
companies touting their latest and greatest flavour of social
networking software, it's not far off the mark. The truth is that in
today's over-informed digital business world, where bloated data moves
at the speed of thought, it is not who you know that really counts,
but who knows you. Professional online social networking tools are
invaluable in creating personal brand equity and raising awareness
about who you are.
Forging relationships
There is a significant business need for these tools as aids to help
us expand our professional influence beyond the Dunbar number.
According to theories evolving from Social Networking Architecture
research, anthropologist Robin Dunbar
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number> estimates that humans
can only maintain stable relationships with around 150 people. That
number refers to significant relationships such as those in a family
or tribe and other purposeful groups.
However, in "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell explores the Dunbar
number's effects on the dynamics of social groups, and those theories
have been popularised and given rise to many business-related
applications.
Systems for managing and sharing relationships have been around for a
long time. From the original contact management systems like ACT! and
GoldMine, to the very first networking sites like sixdegrees.com, they
all walk a fine line between sharing too much information and not
enough to be of use. However, they have all tried to multiply our
ability to maintain business relationships with hundreds, or even
thousands, of people.
There is one important weakness in this new generation of
collaborative social networking. If users do not trust the system to
protect their relationships, then they will not use the application
effectively and gain very little incremental advantage from their
connections. On the other hand, too much protection limits the
effective range or depth of penetration achievable within a user's
extended 'friend of a friend' network, thus also limiting the
effectiveness of such a network.
Somewhere between those two extremes lies the advantage of a well-
utilised and semi-trusted professional social network.
Major benefits
Online social networking software enables you to find quality people
who may not be familiar with you or with your organisation, and
creates an opportunity to connect with them and sell them on your
opportunities. They may be unfamiliar with your company or business,
or may not have even been looking for something.
Because you already know someone who knows them, you can feel more
comfortable that they are a quality prospect. Also, because of that
mutual connection, you can more easily overcome cumbersome barriers
and begin a relationship with a little more trust and warmth than with
a total stranger. Like 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon', social networking
sheds light on the contacts you never knew you had. Here are some
advantages:
You can contact people in your network to:
- Rekindle old connections
- Maximise value in your weak connections
- Build business relationships with clients or hiring managers
- Find and meet prospective jobseekers
- Grow a referral network
- Heighten your corporate and personal brand
- Make new connections and grow your sphere of influence
- Open doors to future career opportunities, increased pay or
promotions
- Increase visibility, which improves influence and effectiveness
internally with your organisation as well as externally.
Find new leads for networking into companies to:
- Educate yourself and ask questions about other organisations
- Conduct competitive intelligence on companies, industries or
individuals
- Make fewer cold calls and better prepare for them
- Leverage contacts you already have.
Major players
With most services, the initial sign up is free. Users begin by
filling out a form with personal data and then inviting friends. Some
networks allow for uploading current contacts, but others ask users to
invite contacts directly through the application's interface. The
connections then invite their own contacts, and that's how the network
grows.
There are hundreds of online social networking sites. Most of the
applications competing for your attention offer a combination of
professional and personal networking. Some are better suited to find a
date while others are more seriously oriented to business. After
joining and reviewing the top 20 players, three of them stand out:
LinkedIn.com
- Profiles look very much like a cv, excellent mix of people from
different levels in the organisation, and many industries
- Endorsements set trusted people apart
- Search for: industry experts, potential employees, hiring managers,
deal-makers, people from specific geographies, or people with
particular keywords in their profiles
- Particular focus on business networking. Over 8.5 Million members.
Plaxo.com
- Keeps all of your current contacts' information updated
automatically thus is extremely useful in rekindling old
relationships and staying in touch.
- Not a tool to build your network yet, though it does have a very
useful 'mini blog' feature to help you keep friends informed. About
15 million people use Plaxo.
Spoke.com
- Focused on providing sales prospects
- Deeply integrated, extracts contact data from enterprise
applications (eg, Outlook, Notes, etc) to establish and leverage
connections. About 30 million contacts.
There are so many social networks that they are too numerous to list
in this article. A majority of them, like friendster.com, flickr.com
and orkut.com among hundreds of others tend to revolve around strictly
social categories like dating, common interests, finding friends and
photo sharing. Arguably, community Web logging sites like MySpace.com,
Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal.com and Blogger.com are also
networking sites. Here are some other notable networks with a
decidedly business or professional purpose, ranked by size:
- Hi5.com - 50 million users. General social networking and business
- Passado.com - 4.7 million users. Europe's largest business network
- Xing.com - 'Crossing' has 4 million users. Was OpenBC. Business
networking
- Ryze.com - 250,000 users. Business networking
- Ecademy.com - 100,000 users. Business networking.
Concerns with networking sites
Privacy
- Online networking is safe. The major players are mindful of your
privacy. That said, each network has its own privacy policy - so
read it, and if you don't like it don't join!
- Uploading your contacts doesn't mean they get to keep them or use
them in any way. They use your contacts only to tell you who is
already registered, or to help you with your connections. Be
careful, however, because if you invite someone who wasn't already a
member and they join now, that person will be available to others
who may want to connect directly with them
- If someone gains access to your passwords they could log in and
export all your contacts. Use good judgment protecting your account
- Remember, the more you share the more you are exposed. But, you will
increase your benefit from the network with more exposure
- The basic concept involves a little trust. I scratch your back, you
scratch mine. For the network to be most useful to you there needs
to be a little reciprocity. People who are very guarded about their
privacy may not get great results from using these networks.
Barriers to entry
- Getting started means investing time to enter your information into
the application. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few
hours, depending on how much you want to get out of using the
network. The more you share about yourself the easier it will be to
make connections
- If you only upload a few contacts you get very little benefit since
these systems only search for connections through people you already
know
- You need to know at least one person with a large network or else
you are very limited with whom you can reach. Search for people you
know who may already be in the network and ask them for a
connection, particularly if they are well connected themselves
- The most challenging barrier is getting people from your 'in person'
real life network to sign up. You know they have lots of
connections, and they would be willing to help you, but they are not
already signed up. If you get them to sign up, you can both benefit
from each other's connections, but then you become their mentor and
may feel obligated to help them more than you would otherwise.
Maintenance
- If you have a large network you could get to a point where you are
getting barraged with requests. The good news is you can turn on or
off e-mails about your accounts or from your network, and with some
networks you can even change your settings to accept requests from
specific levels. The other side of turning off the communication is
that you lose out on reminders that help you to remember to groom
your network
- Evaluating new 'friends' is difficult. You may get requests from
people you don't know or don't remember and it can be awkward to
write back telling them you don't remember them. Just like meeting
someone in person, you may have to bite the bullet and confront them
with a 'have we met?' or you may need to just ignore them
- Don't add everyone indiscriminately. Be just a little picky in
adding new friends you don't know. Remember, you are a reflection of
your networks. People know you not only by who you are but also by
whom you choose to associate.
Integration with software and between networks
- With Plaxo you can export your data in a flat file format making it
easy to transfer your contacts to a new application
- Some networks like LinkedIn have useful toolbars that integrate with
Outlook and make it easier to keep your network fresh
- With most of the networks you can export your contacts. Do this
regularly so that if for some reason your account is lost you can
still retain your connection's contact information. You can also
take it with you to import it into another network
- Note that it's impossible to synchronise across networks. You may
find some of the same people in several networks, but the best
strategy is to choose your favourite three or five and stick to them
or else you will be spending all your time maintaining several
networks.
Losing touch with the 'Real'
- E-mail is very cold and unemotional. Relying on e-mail and similar
messaging to connect with people can wash out the emotional side of
building relationships
- Remember to pick up the phone and call your contacts every once in a
while. This way they are more likely to forward your requests, and
ask you for requests, making your network stronger.
Free now, pay later?
- Many of these services are not currently charging fees to get
started in them but they may begin to impose membership fees for
even the basic accounts or activities.
Social Networking is getting involved and getting your name out every
chance you get. Like meeting people in person, it can be hit or miss.
The single most powerful advantage of online networking is finding new
connections you didn't know you already had. It takes time and energy
to build a network, either in person or online. With the Internet we
have the ability to reach more people.
Don't be afraid to connect, stay connected, share, participate, be
vulnerable, open yourself to the world. Being connected in this way is
an incredible leverage that will prove invaluable in your business
development. Connections can have many unexpected positive results.
Shally got his start in research in 1996 when he realized that as a
contingency recruiter he could beat the competition and make more
money by finding people who were not easily available in mainstream
sources. Since then he has built several centralized sourcing and
research organizations from the ground up for large multinational
organizations like Cisco, Motorola, Coke, Google and Microsoft. Shally
now spends his time consulting with organizations on how to build
research teams and develop their advanced sourcing skills. Visit:
<http://www.jobmachine. net/shally> for a complete bio, and to learn
more about what Shally has to offer recruiters check out:
<http://jobmachine.net/card>
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