Jun 13, 2007
How To Network Effectively
Sitting in a prospect reception earlier I thumbed through a broadsheet business section. It’s always struck me as strange that the “Qualities” do not leverage their journalism more. Articles in these sections are pretty much one of three types: fresh company news, economic comment/analysis, or general business-life advice.
It is this third category they could do more with. Y’know the thing? An interview with a famous industrialist, a ‘how-to’ guide on a business topic, taking advantage of a trend, the list goes on. They all lend themselves sweetly to being both educational and entertaining, so why not bunch them all together once a month and put out a magazine based on them. Perfect - they’d make a right few quid, and the Observer’s done it with their Sunday Monthlies successfully for ages now…..
Anyhow, two such pieces by/about successful female networkers caught my mind. The first was on how to network effectively. Among the many friendly kicks up the backside provided is that “you should never sit next to anyone you know at a networking event”. The second toolkit, came from Carole Stone, famous for having 17,000 friends. This included how to ensure contacts became re-contact-able, which is interesting as how many people do you meet, yet never really pave the way for bumping into and gaining mutual benefit from again? I for one am pretty useless at keeping in touch and have certainly found it hard to keep track of who’s bought from me in the past, let alone those that didn’t!
do you think having all those friends will help 17000? do they really have a bond between all of them?
I saw a show on telly a couple of weeks back that added up what our lives amounted to in terms of activities, food, etc; y’know the kind of thing - on average we spend so-many years of our lives asleep, we eat zillions of potatoes, a certain number of cows (23, I think). And from memory it claimed that in our lives we make 1,700 friends. That seems a lot too (!) yet is still only a tenth of the figure above….
But, and there is a big but, social networking is of course changing the game, don’t you think? I’ve avoided Facebook so far, mainly because my pals find it all too addicitve and hate the fact that people just a couple of years out of uni can have a forest of friends, whereas now all mine are so scattered that they cling only on to the odd leaf! With the imminent arrival of socialstream (http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2006/SocialstreamProject/index.php), this surely can only exponentially continue…
I concur that 17,000 is a bit cumbersome perhaps, but just like with Malcolm Gladwell’s “connectors” and Metcalfe’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe’s_law), who cares if everyone has a common bond so long as you gain from just one extra connection?