Too Many Friends

I’m almost afraid to open Facebook now because there is just too much awesome there. Despite my best efforts to keep Facebook strictly for social applications outside of business, I’ve friended many of my business contacts and that’s where I need to go for their updates. Unfortunately, many of my friends are profoundly cool and always have something interesting to share. If I start in on reading the updates, the odds of my getting sidetracked from whatever I am supposed to be doing by some interesting news or bright shiny object proffered by my friends approaches 100%. So while I have activated my social and professional network on Facebook and stay abreast of their news and my industry, the way it is set up conspires against my making it productive.

LinkedIn is no better. Of my almost 400 contacts, my relationships with about 300 of them are totally irrelevant to my business. There are maybe 50 contacts of whom I have virtually no recollection whatsoever. They might have been a sales rep for a company I was considering doing business with or someone I met one time at a trade show. So while I know a fair amount of people on LinkedIn, many with fairly responsible positions in the industries in which I work, I am still bombarded with questionably relevant updates, events, questions, and invitations pleading for my attention, demanding an extraordinary amount of sorting, prioritizing and weighing to make sense or derive value from.

I know its old school, but I believe the premise of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and countless other commonsensical business books . You have give real, quality time and attention to the people in your network to develop business. If I apply those lesson to today’s social networks, I find myself needing to focus on the contacts closest to me. Close, meaning I could call them up out of the blue just as easily as sending an email. Close, meaning that they like me, respect me, and would likely help me if I asked. Secondly, I’d like to focus on contacts that are relevant to my business. Relevant, meaning that they could influence, recommend, specify or purchase what I am selling or put me in touch with someone who could. When I apply these filters to my contact list, I find that there are mighty few people in that close and relevant category. That may be why growing my former consulting business by gathering relationships in and participating with social networks proved so challenging.

Looking forward, I can only see my Facebook and LinkedIn update stream of posts, events, and links getting larger and more peripheral to my business. If I am to harness the power of social media to make my business network a real generator of new business, I need an application that will sort, classify, analyze and prioritize my contacts on the axes of closeness and relevance and allow me to engage them in the context of that relationship and in support of getting more of them into the close and relevant productive zone. Perhaps that will help me navigate my way around those bright shiny objects that my friends throw up to distract me. You may have guessed by now that that may be one of the features of the application on which we are working.

Sabin