The Conversation is Often a Broadcast
Scenario: It’s the week after you’ve attended a conference. Sitting at your computer you come across a stack of business cards, folks you’d like to keep in contact with—(ideally to create and maintain a relationship). You jot off a series of non-pitchy, follow-up emails—albeit there could be sales potentials but the relationship is what you are focused on. This is what you get back:
Bill
I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
-Anon
No email response. No reference to the conference you both attended, just a simple LinkedIn invitation. You believe there is value in the relationship, so you click “Accept” and realize you are one 500+ people in this persons network. Whoanh Whoanh.
Many of the people using LinkedIn and other social networking/community sites are digitizing the card dispenser/amasser strategy akin to conferences, by trolling for contacts. There are some people/firms who don’t take individuals/companies seriously unless they have a magic number of contacts in their social network. And what originally started out as a global conversation has quickly degraded into a broadcast. “It’s not what you know but who you know” has taken on a life of it’s own, and in some cases not for the best.
When you have 2149 contacts in your social network, how many of those people do you really know? Are you building those relationships or are they notches in your networking belt?
A community usually works together to embrace the well being of the group. A network is a connection, lacking an emphasis on how strong or weak that connection is. A community (virtual or real) is comprised of a coterie you could turn to for advice and assistance. Your network consists of folks who are more apt to wonder what is in it for them. My neighbor Jeff knows a great mechanic—that’s my community. My mechanic—that’s my network. Can they be one in the same, yes, but it takes work.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Great insight on another aspect of the information ocean. Some interesting approaches to making information useful are http://www.wombeat.com & http://www.relyable.net, both of which focus on “reputation” marketing.
Being significantly grey on top I recall the very first PDA’s which promised to structure random information. We’ve evolved to better tools but they’ve been subsumed by the sheer volume.