* Advice and How-To's How to Get the Most from Your Social Network

From ERENet.com | Apr 20, 2010 | by Kevin Wheeler

Social networks have grown to the point where they now challenge
traditional ways of communicating, marketing, and recruiting. One of the
measures we often use to determine the success of our networking is to
count the number of people in it. But this is not really a valuable
measure: I have over 10 million first, second, and third-degree
connections in LinkedIn and I get almost no value from that network, per
se. I get little value because many of my contacts are active
recruiters. As I am neither an active recruiter nor a candidate, not
much interaction happens. And this illustrates one of the several
criteria needed to make a network really valuable.

Valuable, robust networks need to meet at least four criteria: (1)
they need to be focused and made up of people with similar interests and
motivations who are seeking the same thing; (2) they need an
instigator, a moderator, perhaps even a rebel, who rouses passions and
gets people engaged; (3) they need a large enough number of people so
that someone is always "there" to respond, comment, and keep the ball
rolling; and (4) they need to save time and energy in some way.

They Need to Be Focused and Have Similar Members

Networks are collections, but they are collections of people rather
than books or stamps. Successful collectors of anything do not just
collect at random. The good ones have a system, a focus, and a rationale
behind their collecting. For example, stamp collectors are usually
focused on a specific country or on a theme. The same is true for coin
collectors. Baseball card collectors concentrate on a team or league or
person. Focus is necessary, and is the first rule for successful use
of networks because it is so difficult to sift through thousands of
anything to find the one(s) that meet your criteria. It is much better
to have hurdles to entry that ensure the integrity of those who are
admitted. A recruiter, for example, needs to know exactly what type of
people they are looking for, and then spend the time to attract only
those type, before admitting them to their community of similar people.
If you are looking for dissimilar people, it is better to set up a
separate network for each type.

There Needs to Be High Levels of Interaction and Useful Conversation

The second rule of getting value out of your network is to create a
forum where there is interaction and conversation. You need to foster
discussion and get people engaged in issues that shed light on their
interests and skills. If no one comments on your posts, agrees or
disagrees with your point of view, or adds their own thoughts that you
comment on, most of the value is gone. When you think about the topics
you discuss, you will probably see that much of it consists of small
talk. We chatter about the weather events, books, music, and our kids -
not that often about the big issues. And it is through these seemingly
innocuous and even mundane chats that we learn what a person is really
like. It is through the tweets and comments that we identify with people
and come to understand their posture on issues.

It is very easy to think that people who always contribute to a
discussion are the best, but I believe that the volume and frequency of
communication are not necessarily indicators of quality. The networks
where people engage in discussions about relevant issues and have
arguments that are based on facts and evidence are powerful, but hard to
find. It often requires someone to throw out the contentious statement
or ask the tough question to get people interested enough to respond. It
is by seeing how people respond that you can gain an appreciation for
someone's style and ability to get along with others or influence them.

Have a Number of Community Managers

The third rule is to always have someone ready to engage the network
member in conversation, creating an widespread army of volunteers who
are willing to monitor your network traffic and comment when
appropriate. Nothing is worse that commenting on something or putting
in a question and then getting nothing back for weeks. This person might
be a full-time community manager. Even better, it could be many people
dispersed throughout the organization. Crowdsourcing this role made
sense and provides for more timely responses as well as for more
variety.

Show Value

And finally you and others need to see that the network is delivering
better candidates, better quality, and more hires than whatever you
used before. I don't think a social network can overcome the fact that
other methods are cheaper or work better simply because it is new. We
know enough about how to make them successful to ensure we get the
metrics we need.

The number of people in your network is important, but not by itself.
Size is important because it allows more network members to be equally
engaged all the time, and the larger the network, the better the chances
are that someone will be available and ready to engage in discussion
and debate. Global reach and broader criteria for membership can help
expand the numbers, but it is always a tradeoff between volume, quality,
and focus.

If you watch networks for a while, you begin to see how many
disappear after a few months. Only a handful remain for more than a year
or two. It's generally because they do not meet these simple, but tough
to pull off, criteria.