Sacred Cow Dung: RE: [LinkedInnovators] The Dark Side of the Network

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May 28, 2005

RE: [LinkedInnovators] The Dark Side of the Network

Yahoo! Groups : LinkedInnovators Messages : Message 151 of 162

[ Once again, Scott Allen steps in and proves that he is the one “Fair and Balanced” Online Business Networking Guru out there today (not an incorrigible troublemaking pundit with an ax to grind like myself). Definitely read his blogs regularly (The Virtual Handshake Blog, Guide to Entrepreneurs, and others) and get his book, The Virtual Handshake, (co-authored with David Teten, another mover and shaker to be watched) — cgm]

Christian Mayaud wrote:

> truth be told, even Scott has moved his position a bit closer to the "darkside" since his early writings that you refer to ...

The main thing that my conversations with Chris last year made me realize is that there are a number of types of people for whom the link-mongering strategy is probably a good strategy:

-          If you are a job seeker, and looking for work is your full-time job

-          If your job is essentially a relationship broker, e.g., recruiters, agents, etc.

-          If your role in your business is to attract large numbers of people, e.g., members to a paid-membership web site, visitors to a site with ad revenue, etc. (Thomas Power)

-          If you do a very small number of deals that make you very large sums of money, and the bulk of your time is spent looking for just the right deal, e.g., venture capitalists (Christian).

One of the greatest fallacies, I believe, of much of what has been taught about networking is that it’s “one size fits all”, for the most part. But the reality is that different types of businesses (and different roles within an organization) have radically different needs regarding their business relationships. David and I have broken that down into what we call the Seven Keys, which is a bit lengthy to go into here, but I’ll post a document about this weekend on the web site. The gist of it, though, is that some people need to focus more on quality (a smaller number of closer relationships), while for others, an emphasis on quantity (a larger number of very weak relationships) may make sense.

Christian wrote:

> The reality is that "quantity and quality" just aren't related concepts --
> Quality is a property of the relationship ...
> Quantity is a property of LinkedIn search engine performance

It’s true that quantity and quality are measures of different things, of course. In *general*, though, when it comes to relationships, they are inversely related, in the sense that the more people you know, the less well you know them (on average), and that building close relationships takes time, and therefore you must have a smaller number of relationships. Of course, this refers to averages – everyone has a spectrum of relationships strengths within their network. But building strong relationships takes time.

However, Christian raises an excellent point: on LinkedIn, quantity affects search engine performance. The more people you know directly, the more people in LinkedIn can see you in search results, and you them. Is that a good thing? Probably so.

But there is a trade-off – for yourself, there’s more time spent processing requests, particularly ones to which you can’t really add anything.

My bigger concern is for the overall value of the network. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If I’m trying to make a four-degree connection, and one of the connections in the middle is between two people who’ve never met, never even spoken, just agreed to connect, then my connection becomes ineffective. At that point, I’d be better off figuring out how to contact the person directly (which I’ve been known to do when the connection was three or four degrees away and I knew that my connection path was through a “link-monger”).

I empathize with the challenges LinkedIn faces with this issue. Reading between the lines of what Konstantin said, the “networkers” encourage usage and tend to invite larger numbers of people into the network, which both increases the value of the network and the potential paid subscriber base. At the same time, irritating the “relationship managers”, or reducing their perception of the value of the network because of decreased quality/relevance, potentially reduces the number of paid subscribers and/or how much they are willing to pay.

Solving that is a challenge I don’t envy. J I do think it’s important for all of us to recognize the value of both styles (and a whole spectrum in between), and try to learn to work together, each bringing its strengths to the table, rather than trying to evangelize your personal approach to everyone else.

Scott Allen

http://TheVirtualHandshake.com

http://Entrepreneurs.About.com

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