Businesspeople managing their weak links: or, why some people have 500+ contacts on LinkedIn
There’s a comment that I hear frequently, when talking about social networks with folks who themselves aren’t heavy users: “What’s with those people who have hundreds of friends on their friendslist? Nobody has *that* many friends.”
The unspoken judgment is that people with “too many” names in their social network “don’t know what a real friend is” and are probably shallow and superficial in their friendships.
There are a number of reasons why some people rack up the headcount on their friendslists. (It’s well known that a few people are into the game of it, chasing the high score.) But there is a practical reason for having a lot of contacts: online social network tools are a great way to manage your weak links.
Some people really seem to understand the benefits of building and leveraging their weak links. Other people don’t get it and derisively call it “social climbing” or “networking” or “collecting people.”
But it’s the weak ties that make the world go round. There’s been research going back decades on the importance of acquaintances and friends-of-friends for finding new jobs, spreading information, etc. In business, it’s a valuable skill to be able to produce useful connections as needed, ie the stereotypical big rolodex. Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point
In many businesses, the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the more you’re expected to have a valuable network that you can tap to solve business problems. That rolodex is part of the reason you get hired. One of the first things that good executives do when they meet a new person is ask a few questions to determine 1) what skill this new person has, and 2) where s/he fits in the exec’s existing social network. (This is true for all good business leaders, regardless of the size or type of the business. My husband’s father runs a small family business and is one of the most connected people I know.)
Before the internet era, the tools for managing these weak ties were limited to your own brain/memory, business card filing systems (bleh), and the classic rolodex. The new online systems have a lot of benefits:
It’s easy to add people to your network. As long as somebody’s already in the system, it’s easy to invite or link them. As a network good, the more people belong, the more beneficial the network for everybody, so once a specific social networking tool “tips” in a given industry, there’s social pressure on people to sign up.
Contact information is likelier to stay up-to-date. When people change jobs, they aren’t likely to notify every member of their extended network; job or residence changes are one way that people fall out of your extended network. However, people are more likely to update their contact info on their online bio. (And Plaxo just isn’t a good alternative, IMO; it’s spamming. Sending everybody in your address book a just-in-case email every year, asking them to confirm their contact information, is intrusive.)
You can see the interconnections inside your network. The old rolodex conceptual model is linear / alphabetical; it can’t easily show the interconnections between people. Software is better showing this in various ways (graphically, with strength of connection measured by various attributes, etc.).
You can see the connections outwards from your network. IME, the one-step introductions have been very effective; the more steps, the less likely the introduction will happen. (Although specialists in this field, like the people at Spoke Software, have data that even multiple handoff introductions work fairly frequently.) But without the broader network map, I wouldn’t even know who was out there, at the one step distance. There wasn’t an easy way to address this problem prior to online social networks.
You won’t lose your network information if your hard drive crashes or you misplace your paper address book. I still remember early in my career making xerox copies of my address book in case I ever lost it. It took hours. What a hassle.
A few good links about social networks, esp in a business context:
Shiv Singh with Avenue A / Razorfish has a great article about social networks and weak ties here.
Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School professor, has an article here about the value of internal business Facebook type applications and the business benefits of a weak tie network.
This is an article about a specialist in business organizational networks (and who happens to have been a professor at my business school, UCLA, back when): Karen Stephenson was studying org communications networks way before the internet era. Her company is Netform.