Your network: for or against you?

Email Network (detail)
Email Network (detail)

Your network can help you or work against you, it all depends on the level alignment between your network and your goals.  If you are trying to get something done with a team, your network should reflect that.  If you are looking for new opportunties, your network should reflect that.

I wrote a short piece for Pollock|Spark about personal networks and suggesting people beginning thinking about the power of networking to help meet their goals.

Every book on sales, finding a new job, etc. stress the importance of networking, and rightly so.  While is certainly easier for some than others, the validity to networking is no longer the question.  The question you want to ask yourself is: who?

Over our lifetimes of participating with networks ranging from work, to family, to neighborhoods, to hobbies; we accumulate many contacts.  There are significantly more effective and efficient ways to spread the word than reaching out to everyone you know, if you know your network.

Let’s go through a few hints, using the image in this article created from my personal email over the past year or so.  Click on the image to blow if up larger.

  • Respect your friends and colleagues. If you abuse their hospitality and trust, not only will you lose them, but you’re also done for.
  • Don’t spend equal time with everyone.  Some people can help you more than others.
  • If everyone in a group knows each other, only spend time on only a handful of people. When everyone knows each other, the network is dense.  Many of the orange and yellow clusters in the image are dense.
  • Make a special effort with people that connect one or more of your groups.

Visualizing Your Professional Networks

Erich's LinkedIn
17,000+ on LinkedIn

I spend much of my waking time thinking about how relationships between individuals in groups effect the behavior of the individuals and of the group itself. One tool I recently put together looks at professional relationships from LinkedIn.com.

Attached is a representation of the relationships between the 17,000 people my work contacts know. This is how we know us.

If you want to know what your network looks like, drop me a line.

This is…How We Know Us

1,000,000 Blogs

We are only beginning to gain an understand about how group decision making works, and the dynamics of the rolls individuals play in the process; despite a strong and accumulating academic history.

With the rise in data availability through Social Networks, the potential for learning and profit are unprecedented in this field, but so is the necessity for exploring the ethical implications of the practice.

This site is named for the idea that the way individuals aggregate into networks gives us a picture of influence over the flow of information and opinions within. Together, these help define our own opinions of everything, including ourselves. This is How We Know Us