Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Day 268-Networking VI Remaining Active in my Network

A social network diagram
Image via Wikipedia
The human brain is a good analogy of  the relationship you have with your network.  We now know that at any part of your life you can form new brain synapses—new connections between information and emotions.  Somewhat like a muscle, if you do not use your brain, the unused synapses with wither and die—a pruning to reduce useless complexity.  If you abuse your body, or fail to keep it in shape it will have negative consequences on your brain.
You can at anytime, grow your network and add to it.  No surprise here.   We have always had networks of relationships in our lives.  And we have always had  tools to help us manage these relationships—tools like calendars, day timers, and the infamous little black address—tools that help us to remember things like the addresses, the names and ages of kids, and the anniversary of Jim down in accounting.  Studies should that those with a more active social network are happier and healthier.
I remember the expanding power when I could add all the birthdays I wanted into my Outlook calendar and I didn’t to fuss with them at the beginning of the year by transferring them to a new calendar.  This allowed me to track many more birthdays than I ever had before. Those times when I could say, “don’t you have a birthday coming up?” or “didn’t your son just turn 9?” made the little bit of effort to record dates well worth it.
We have always had networks of relations, but today’s  tools have changed the way we interact with our networks.  They allow us to add and track many, many more connections. In addition to the tracking, they also make it easy to reach out and touch those in our network.
The second part of the brain analogy is that what doesn’t get used will whither and die.  This is the same with your network.  The people in your network, that never hear from you, or never see you, and or otherwise lose track of you for long periods of times will tend to forget you.  So, while the ability to grow your network has been made much easier, it doesn’t help if you don’t exercise those relationship nodes every once in a while. 
This is the main point of this post.  And there are many ways to remain active in your network.  Just as recording everyone's birthday in your little black book, and never acting on this information—never using this information to say Happy Birthday at the appropriate time wouldn’t help you, neither does always listening to the conversations on LinkedIn or Facebook and never interacting.   As in the rest of life, you have to participate to be in the game.
John Gottman, noted marriage researcher and counselor, states that in order to have healthy relationship there needs to be 5 positive interactions to each not so positive interaction.  This applies in networking, though the number might be much higher than 5 due to it being so easy for someone to disconnect from you when you are only virtually related in the first place.  
Can you think of times that people may link a negative connotation with your name?  What are these negative interactions.  These are anytime you put someone in a uncomfortable position or feel you have wasted their time.   Think about all the posts that you read that make you wonder about the person posting it.   Even though most people are happy to help, when you ask for help, it pulls on the relationship and acts as a negative.   I'm sure that many of my blog posts have associated negativity with them for being too long, for being boring, or for just being a waste of time.
What are positive interactions.  When you provide value to someone, when you make them feeling better, when you provide something new and interesting, or you just deeply hear them then you are adding to the relationship—to the positive interactions.  This can be a kind and empathetic note, a but of humor in a tense day, or a link to something interesting.
Participation is a must and there are many ways to participate.  Being on the sidelines and never adding to the conversations is depriving people of your uniqueness.  Some ways to participate require more thought can care than others. 
“Reports of my Death have been greatly exaggerated”, Email.
One of the best ways is still email.  Every so often you see a news article proclaiming email is dead, don’t believe it.  Email is simple and direct, and most people are relatively confident in the ability to converse via email.  The generation now graduating from high school and attending college shies away from email in favor of more immediate conversations like SMS messaging and twitter, but for the balance of people email is a mainstay.  You can have a great and powerful network using nothing but email.  Not sure why you would want to limit your interaction to just email,  but it is possible.
LinkedIn is becoming a must for professional networking, because recruiters use it to gain information on candidates.  I attended a LinkedIn class at WorkSource this week, and it was stated that having a bad LinkedIn Profile is just as bad as having no LinkedIn Profile.  In both cases it may cause the recruiters, HR, and hiring managers to reject you.  You want to your LinkedIn profile to be very high level and give an overview of who you are.
You also need to pay attention and make comments about the changing status of the people in your network.  You wouldn’t want to comment on every change, but noting accomplishments and personal milestones is a positive interaction (and fun to do).  You can also share interesting information that may help others.  Sharing on LinkedIn is assumed to be from a professional perspective.  Posting that you are going to the grocery store would probably be wrong on all social networks, but on LinkedIn it would seemed in real bad taste.

In the next post, I will continue with LinkedIn and how I use groups and then cover a newer tools like Tweetdeck and GIST  to both  keep up with what my network is doing and  to ease the ability of communicating with my network.

My overall plan on Networking was to cover the following:
  • Keeping my Network Informed
  • Remaining Active in my Network (especially on the professional side)
  • Maintaining Personal Contact
  • Leveraging Networking resources
  • Growing my Network
We are in the middle of the second bullet.

Here are some additional resources:
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Posted by Chris M Abbey at 12:07 PM
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