Perspectives & Strategy

One of the biggest challenges of social networking is in choosing the right networks to be active on and determining how you wish to be active on each. Every reader probably has a connection that invites you to every on-line community they know about. The problem is appropriateness and how you allot your time and whether you will derive benefit from the proposed new network.

It is a dichotomy that in joining a social network it is important to have people to connect with, yet asking everyone you already know to join may not be the best way to jump-start that activity for any new network. An as yet undiscovered social network will bring with it new challenges and new opportunities to connect that may not be relevant to your existing connections. People use different networks for different purposes, there are plenty of people that only use Facebook for social activity, and would never consider using it for business focused networking, which is where they might use LinkedIn.

This is fine, but it does not suit everyone, this writer has an active Facebook account, and never uses it for connections that are purely social in character. The upshot is that children, nieces, and nephews, are not in the ‘friend’ list because it is not appropriate, yet we communicate by telephone, mail, and email regularly. On a networking front we have little in common to share. In this case connecting offers neither person any benefit.

So how many networks should you join and be active on? This is a difficult question to answer as the factors that impact your available time will be key here and you will have to make the decision here. Remember the key word here is “ACTIVE” – being a member of a site and using it once per year is not being active. It means setting aside some time, albeit a small amount, each day or each week to participate  The job seeker may have more time to spend than the busy executive. and is recognised that an individual’s ability to be active changes over time. But each person’s ability to spend time on-line will depend on how busy they are in the real world.

Generally you should look to be active on those networks that have the potential to give you the greatest return for your time and efforts.

It may seem strange to be talking of ‘self’ when everyone knows the first rule of social networking to be assisting someone else. In joining any social network the first thing you should consider is how you, your corporation, or your brand will leverage it. If the site has no relevance to you or your business then do not join. Of course when you do join the way to connect and give value is to help others resolve their problems, but it is not the reason to join in the first place.

There are a brand of social networkers that want you to join them on a plethora of sites. The specific social media site may in itself be useful to you. Make your own decision about what is best for you. Maybe they have a useful new site that you have never considered before.

For every positive comes some negatives. One of these is the ‘Social Spammer”. They are simply using social media to bolster the apparent size of their network. They leverage the total set of connections in order to appear as a super-connector. Yet unlike the genuine  super-connectors they do not facilitate connection building for others, this is a cynical method of building their own mailing list and either sell it, or to use for email based selling.

The problem is how to spot an abuser. At first they appear innocent and maybe initially be the friend you need in order to understand the system you have accidentally come in contact with, then they become a nuisance as that relationship develops.

They do differ from both open-networkers and super-connectors.

Open networkers positively encourage connections from any other person, whether or not they have had a previous business relationship; they do so with the view that connection sharing is better for the whole community. There is a particular brand of open networkers called LIONs, meaning LinkedIn Open Networker given that the concept started by members on the LinkedIn social network. Yet there is a thriving community of LIONs on Facebook and other social sites.

A super-connector is a particular brand of open networker that know and connect people from all walks of life. They have large numbers in their network and are always happy to assist in making a connection and they will always spend a little time to assist a connection. We all know that personal contacts are the key to opening doors and having a super connector in your network can be extremely useful, especially if you cultivate a close relationship with them. They follow the concept that it is good to build acquaintances and the more acquaintances you have, the more powerful you can become.

Steven Burda is a prime example of a super-connector and he is always willing to assist any connection in any way he can. Both open networkers and super-connectors believe strongly in helping others achieve their goals in some small way.

The social spammer can appear as if they are willing to assist – particularly when they encounter a newcomer to the social media world, yet all their assistance is intended to lead to one result building their own contact list – they are not really interested in what you want and once they have your connection details then they act in exactly the same way an email spammer operates, except they leverage the social media context to spread their message.

Social spamming is not yet as wide-spread as its email counterpart but sadly it is here to stay. What are the signs? You need to be looking out for repeated automation. Everyone has allowed a network to discover potential connections from your Outlook address book, then they also possibly sent out invitations using the standard message. You also discovered that this gets a very low response rate as the message is not personalised. For the social spammer this process is repeated hundreds of times and often they also cause the system to ask you to connect even if you have rejected an earlier invitation.

Some networks, like LinkedIn, do limit the number of invitations that can be sent out, and other networks, like Facebook, do not allow the downloading of contact detail data (the .VCF file). There are plenty of ways to find out a person’s email address – once obtained the social spammer can start their activity and once they have you in their social media network then they can bend it to work as they need it.