afriendineverycity

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Network Evolution – where do we go from here?

It is of course very hard to predict the future however we have to an idea of where online Networks are going in order to attempt some form of planning. I think if we follow the Guilds as a guide we know Guilds evolved into Mutuals, into Building Societies, into Insurance companies and ultimately into Banks.

Perhaps that is one way Networks like Ecademy and others could go. Not necessarily to become banks, of course, but certainly to become trusted intermediaries.

Another way is to become media in their own right much like the the Googlezon Video suggests (though possibly without the catastrophic consequences it predicts). It is possible to become a newspaper, a magazine, a TV channel, a radio channel or a mix of all four or an online vehicle for an existing media player, who knows.

Some of the networks might even become global universities vehicles for education and learning and thus true institutions of the kind I mentioned earlier. The freeform generation will certainly need access to education and training aimed at keeping their skills relevant – a role filled by employers for those in employment.

During the course of the last 91 months almost 93,000 people have joined Ecademy from around the world. This happened entirely through word of mouth and is a remarkable tribute to the active members of Ecademy and their online recommendations and referrals.

What began – in 1998 - as 27 people in a bar drinking chardonnay at the IOD and talking about the future of ecommerce has grown into a global community discussing almost everything imaginable under the sun. There are now 54,000 blogs on Ecademy and over 228,000 comments since we started blogging some 42 months ago.

These figures reflect what is truly amazing about what has happened both inside and outside Ecademy. 7500 people have chosen to become paying subscribers of Ecademy and without them this Network would not be what it is or where it is today. To them I say and we say a very big thank you for supporting us, for believing in us and for sharing us with your friends.

It might be not even be the current management team who take it to its next stage of development whatever that might be.

What the founders, our management team and our country leaders and BlackStar Life Members and all our subscribers around the world know is that at the heart of this particular Ecademy network, is a friendship that is long lasting, a friendship that is physically and mentally enhancing and a friendship that also emits a great deal of work and opportunity for its participating and contributing members around the globe.

Our job now is to internationalise and broaden this network still further so that connecting business people around the world becomes the norm and ordinary and not something special or unique to a select few. It is our belief that by focusing on creating “A Friend in Every City”, networks like Ecademy can provide the backbone of future opportunity for our children and for their children across this tiny planet we call Earth.

Posted by Thomas Power

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People and Online Networks

Why do people join Online Business Networks. I think the answer to this in a word is - Work. Networks are great places to find opportunities, business partners, investors, jobs, clients and suppliers just as the Guilds once were.
So work is the driving force to join a network and, in a highly competitive global market with falling prices, this is not surprising.

Business is harder to come by, so businesses seek a way to extend the reach of the business geographically and demographically. These modern networks (unlike the Guilds) are are made up from all sorts of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, with all sorts of experiences.

I think this explains why over 1800 Clubs have formed on Ecademy with over 2 million messages to allow all these different groups to fracture into lots of little factions as typically happens in any physical community in the real world. Members can be part of the whole community and of many subsets simultaneously leading to a rich experience and opportunity.

Engagement with networks, like any other human endeavour, follows a lifecycle. Most people join with a specific purpose. Some satisfy that purpose (or not) and then move on to other networks, to find new contacts, to learn new things, to study new subjects or simply to try another approach to finding work and developing their businesses whilst others find reasons to remain and to grow within the network.

Some simply never get started. It takes time to settle into a community of any kind. It is just like when you move to a new town or city. You need to spend time finding the best shops, friends, clubs and societies, pubs and bars and social activity. So it is with networks but his investment of time is not available to everyone. Many people never actually discover what is inherent in their community be it physical or online. Some will lose patience and move on whilst others will remain but withdraw from engagement with the community.

There is also a question here of give and take. Getting output from the network is a function of what you put in. Some new members fail to recognise the need for this – for the development of relationships before trying to sell to their fellow members. Immediate selling on joining a network seldom works and the member will often leave disillusioned and saying “I didn’t get a return on my investment”. They miss the point – the key investment is not the subscription or joining fee, it is their time spent in developing relationships with other members.

What is interesting in Ecademy is how few people actually leave and how long they seem to stay. Now in our 8th year we have many, many members who have been with us since those early years when we just had a few hundred members and we were just getting started.

Why do they choose to stick around for so long? This is the most interesting thing to me personally and one where I have spent the most time reading, thinking, researching, interviewing and chatting with people all over the world.

What seems to be driving the desire to stay inside these networks alongside the need for work or business I mentioned earlier is friendship. I think Friendship might be the best definition of Social Capital I mentioned earlier.

For a detailed definition on Social Capital go the Bowling Alone website and also read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Interestingly, Friendship is the same driver that has kept the Guilds (and their successors) growing stronger and stronger since medieval times. It follows for me that that Friendship is the basis of Trust and that Trust is the basis of trade.

So trade or work is an output of Friendship.

In other words Friendship is the basis of Trade.

We all like to do business with people we like and none of us are keen to do business with people we don’t like. This is why at Ecademy we are focused on discovering “A Friend in Every City” in the world so that each and every one of us wherever we go has someone to meet us, to greet us, to take care of us, to guide us, to connect us, to show us round the town and to help us trade with friends the world over. So wherever we are, we feel safe, we feel warm, we feel that wonderful thing we all know called Friendship.

This is why the title of our new book coming in January (for which this blog is a forerunner), will be “A Friend in Every City”.

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Why are Online Networks growing now?

There is no question that the online networks are growing at present. Each day also brings more sites offering connections and community. Which got me thinking – what is the purpose of networks?

The answer, in my view, can be given in one word – SUPPORT.

But what sort of support? “ It could be information support, it could be physical support for your own well being, it could be emotional support, it could be financial support, it could be support in finding work, it could be support in dealing with the complexity of modern life or it could be support in building your own personal network of contacts. Maybe all of the above support mechanisms exist in networks simultaneously.
Support is the key driver in the purpose of networks particularly when so many of our members work from home. 60% of Ecademy members are small businesses and employ less than 100 staff. As more people work from home and for themselves (the Freeformers we talked about in previous blogs), this role will become more vital. It replaces the support that comes from the company network and, as families drift apart in Western society, it also replaces family support.

We all need the simple level of support that is having people around us in a group. This as we know is very important and becoming increasingly important in a frightened world. But there is more to it than fear. I think it has something to do with the growth in complexity. As the average age of Ecademy members is 46 there is also an element of mutual support in the face of a changing world where youth is valued over experience.

We have seen a fall in what Social Scientists call Social Capital or human connectedness. The traditional institutions of the government, of the civil service, of the local councils, of the politicians, of the churches, of the clergy, of the local community groups, of the general support infrastructure in our local communities have declined in value and status.

There are now over 1 million articles on Social Capital on Googleand over 300 books on the subject of Social Capital on Amazon all produced in the last 10 years. One of the best sellers of this genre is “Achieving Success through Social Capital” . by Wayne Baker and is a marvellous read. It is a personal favourite of Glenn Watkins our Chief Executive.

It might be technology and the media that has driven this decline in Social Capital over the past 40 years but most people would agree that the traditional role of institutions is weakening and people seek a solution.
Networks are providing a response to that decline in social capital and the need - in part - to replace it with something else.

Maybe Networks are themselves becoming an institution but the nature of that institution is still uncertain. Nevertheless, millions of people are joining a vast variety of networks all over the planet. Those networks are based around music and relationships (MySpace), College experiences (Alumni groups and TheFaceBook), and, of course, business (LinkedIn, Ecademy).

Has the Internet world - the wired world - of the last 10 years created a new economy? Has the promise of earlier computing generations finally been delivered allowing people to unite around a new economy and learn together?

Historically that would make sense. Networks are much like the Guilds of the past where apprentices of different industries got together to learn techniques of production and to share ideas and resources. In the Internet economy, we are all apprentices.

Dictionary definitions of Guild include “an association of persons of the same trade or pursuits, formed to protect mutual interests and maintain standards” and “a similar association, as of merchants or artisans, in medieval times.”

Technology also explains this growth for two opposing reasons. Technology is an enabler with the arrival of easy communications methods and worldwide access to bandwidth but it is also a problem. Technology has invaded every aspect of our lives and made them complex. As complexity increases and the growth and speed of new products increase, it becomes harder and harder to not only understand but also to keep up with this pace of delivery.

When you can’t keep up with something one of the best ways is joining a collective of people and learning things in groups just like in a classroom at school. Each month I learn a tremendous amount from the management team of Ecademy and the BlackStars with whom I personally spend private time. Without these group meetings I do not know how I could possibly keep abreast of market developments.”

A kind of ‘collective intelligence’ or ‘global mind’ is forming as output from these networks and it is very powerful, very appealing, very addictive mentally and very fast at finding answers to questions. We’ll cover this concept more in a future blog along with concepts like the ‘noosphere’ and the ‘memeosphere’.

Posted by Thomas Power.

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Networks are not competitive

In a phone call from his Californian home in December 2004, Dr Ivan Misner , founder of Business Networks International (BNI), and arguably one of, if not, THE best networker in the world told me, “networks are not competitive, networks are compatible.” Shortly afterwards BNI created a trusted network on the Ecademy platform and Dr Misner now actively encourages his thousands of members worldwide to join. He sees how important it is to network online as well as face-to-face and is walking the talk himself.

Networking is not new. Ever since Stone Age man hunted in packs, we have got together with others to share skills, experience, workload and to support each other. There have been guilds, unions, friendly societies as well as groups based around church, school and sports clubs. Brownies, cubs, Scouts and guides are all networks. We all have membership of several at any one time — including the one closest to home — our family.

According to David Halpern , senior policy adviser at the UK Prime Minister’s strategy unit, when we are networking we are developing Social Capital. In his 2005 book called “Social Capital”, Halpern suggests that Social Capital sits alongside financial capital, physical capital, tangible assets and human capital. He describes it as “social networks and the norms and sanctions that govern their character. It is valued for its potential to facilitate individual and community action, especially through the solution of collective action problems.”

There are many purely social networks in the online space. The largest and most active is MySpace with some 14 million unique visitors a month, which recently, with its owner Intermix media, was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million, the first move by “big media” into the networking space - but probably not the last.

In the business networking space, alongside Ecademy which we describe as a social business network, there are three key networks and I would suggest that, in addition to Ecademy, you should join all three as they provide different dimensions in your networking. They are LinkedIn, Ryze and OpenBC. This is not to say that you should not be joining other networks — Spoke , Tribe , Academici or Soflow for example– just that these are the top four today.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com ) is a huge repository of profiles — well over 3 million and growing. Started by Reid Hoffman , LinkedIn really took off when it received $4.7 million of venture capital in 2003 allowing it to build rapidly. There is now a little social interaction on the site through “affinity clubs” but it is mostly an excellent way of locating and contacting (via people you already know) targeted people in corporations or smaller businesses worldwide. It is also possible to use random approaches to people in similar industries or who are friends of friends.

Ryze (www.ryze.com/ ) was launched in October, 2001 by Adrian Scott who used it to supplement the face to face ‘mixers’ he ran in San Francisco for Finance sector people. It has since outgrown those roots and has, according to its own information, 140,000 members. Ryze’s ambition is to be “a place where professionals from all industries can come together, network, expand their spheres of influence and do business.”

From its early origins in Germany, OpenBC (http://www.openbc.com ) had grown rapidly in a short time to have 50,000 subscribers, communicating in 16 languages across the world. Members can create profiles and start and join clubs. As many as 5,000 members may be online at any time. There is, however, no central place where you can address that online community directly.

Ecademy also offers its members the opportunity the create their personal profile, to build a network, to join clubs to discuss matters of common interest. Through the home page of the network, members can also blog about topics of interest or highlight their offer or requirements using the MarketStar feature. After seven years of development, Ecademy is poised for the next phase of our journey, with a new look planned for later in the year and a book – A Friend in Every City – due to be published very early in 2006.

Simon Rogers , CEO of 2Delta in the UK, is a member of the big four networks plus Soflow and many “real-world” networks, too. He cautions against expecting to find customers and directly from the networks. He finds “door openers” there. “If I don’t continually add to my network — the doors don’t open. The activity never happens when you think it’s going to happen, so you’ve got to keep on meeting people. If you concentrate on just three or four clients at a time, the tap turns off.”

For those whose path will take them into freelance work or self-employment, the model employed by those stone age men, is one that will be readily recognised. For most sole traders, the need to find people to surround them is paramount. Business needs to be found and won. In most cases, hunting for business in packs will improve your chances of success immensely. Online networks provide the raw material for the development of teams across skill sets, across the world.

Posted by Thomas Power

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Networking - Giving before you Receive

As we’ve already suggested in a previous blog, your networking may be the only pension you have. In an age where life expectancy is increasing and investments are making small returns, maybe the UK Pensions Commissioner Adair Turner is right. It will not be the Government’s responsibility nor that of corporations and firms (for those of us who still work for one) to ensure that you can live in retirement. The only person who has any motivation to ensure that you have enough to live on is you.

Through a combination of ageism and de-manning, more people in their forties and fifties (and beyond) are finding themselves out of work. Recruitment consultants and HR departments seem reluctant to interview older workers. Yet, somehow you have to make enough to live on. Maybe you have assets – maybe you don’t. The numbers of self-employed-by-default are growing and include many younger people, too. Amongst them are entrepreneurs who will seize the moment to do what they’ve always dreamed of. Others will be transfixed by the problems of getting themselves heard in an increasingly noisy space. Some will swell the ranks of the self-unemployed. Surviving alone is tough, maybe impossible. You need friends out there who will support you, recommend you, and develop ideas with you. You need a network.

Is your network that pile of business cards you’ve acquired over your years in various jobs? No, not really. There may be the nucleus of a network there. Start by talking to your best contacts – the ones you made a human connection with and work through to the “moved on – no forwarding address” contacts and you’ll discover that, however many business cards you had, you need more real contacts. You need to network.

If you are currently employed, does that remove the need to network? It will probably be true that you have a network that helps you to do your current job. Will they be there for you if, and probably when, you find yourself going it alone? Sadly, experience suggests that most won’t be. In order to plan your future beyond your current role — and even as insurance — you will also need to network.

Is networking about telling people what you do and trusting to luck that someone you meet will employ you or buy from you? As ‘laurarich’ puts it in response to David Teten and Scott Allen’s Fast Company Article , “Why do some people hesitate to embrace networking? How did it earn its seedy reputation? And on the flip side, if you’re an active networker who doesn’t appreciate the stereotype of sweaty palms and business cards, how do you avoid making such an impression?”

Networking is about showing interest – genuine interest – in the person you are meeting. Who are they? What do they do? What do they need? Who do they need to meet and connect with? Can you help to connect them with people who can help them on their journey? Ask for nothing – just give. If you don’t help others, why should anyone help you?

If you are asking, “What’s in it for me?”, you need to be patient. Start by giving and, in time, others will begin to give to you. You will find yourself in conversation with people who ask you those questions and they will, if they can, begin to connect you with people who can help you on your journey. Kim Sharman of networking group NRG Networks talks about building advocates rather than trying to sell to networking contacts.

As weI’ve already discussed in a previous blog, the chances are that the contacts you need are not the people you are talking to directly, but people in their network or their network’s network. To be seen as someone who is prepared to help and who has a generosity about the way they approach their networking, will make you more attractive and more memorable when your connections are thinking about someone for a role that you can play.

You can network in many ways. A recent survey by Spitfire Communications suggests that only 6% of their respondents would trust, and buy from, or hire someone who approached them via an online network. 26% of respondents said they would wait for a phone contact before beginning to trust them, while 40% would wait for a face-to-face meeting. A full 46% said they would wait to hear from someone they know personally before they considered a person trustworthy. They conclude that it seems that online networking isn’t enough on its own. At Ecademy, we have been holding face-to-face events since we began in 1998. We see face-to-face events as the secret of successful networking and of our own referral only growth.

Face-to-face networking comes from many sources and in many guises. Some events offer you the chance to meet the same group of people on a regular basis to develop a deep relationship whilst others offer the opportunity to develop many “weak ties” (as described in by Mark Granovetter in his 1973 PhD paper) which can be developed further to grow your network in new directions.

Most Chamber of Commerce chapters now hold networking events as do many professional organisations. You can network over breakfast with groups like BNI and BRE , over lunch with NRG and in the evening (sometimes over dinner) with Ecademy . The groups mentioned in that sentence, all use Ecademy as their chosen way of connecting with their members in between meetings and also of connecting different geographical groups together as a community.

Wherever you are in your career, it is never too late to do more networking. Just bear in mind that real networking is not just a dictionary synonym for selling, it is an art in its own right. So whatever you do, avoid becoming “the stereotype of sweaty palms and business cards” and networking will become a positive part of your marketing strategy.

Posted by Thomas Power.

Useful Reference Sources:

www.fastcompany.com/resources/networking/teten-allen/010305.html
www.nrg-networks.com/
www.spitfirevision.com/survey.html
In Out and Beyond
www.bni.com/
www.brenet.co.uk/index.htm

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21st-century Worksong: I’ve been workin’ and workin’ but still got so terribly long to go…

“Been workin’ and workin’ but still got so terribly long to go.” So runs the chorus of Worksong written in 1960 by Oscar Brown Jr and Nat Adderley. The context was a man jailed for the crime “of bein’ hungry and poor” who now works on the chain gang serving a sentence for murder. Listening to Paul Jones , once of Manfred Mann and now of the Blues Band, singing this song recently got me thinking about its relevance for us as workers in the 21st-century economy?

In previous blogs, we have addressed the number of people who are choosing, or being chosen for, a life of “freeforming”. There is an issue, or more properly a complex of issues, that affects all of us.

That issue is retirement — or the lack of it. Not so long ago, it was possible to retire - sometimes as young as 50 - and live off an index linked, final salary pension. Retirees in the last decades of the 20th century certainly had that possibility. That is no longer a possibility for many, maybe most of us.

One group of people that still have that possibility as Patience Wheatcroft , business editor of The Times points out in her column ‘Poor Old Public Sector? Give us a break’ (The Times 15th July 2005) is the ever growing public sector (up by 270,000 jobs in 2002-4) most of whom “are still scheduled to retire at 60 on guaranteed salary related pensions”.

More of us than ever now work for ourselves. Self-employment has always been a less dependable way of earning a consistent income and as a result, many self-employed people find it difficult to save for their retirement. As more work is outsourced and offshored and as their members are swelled by the self-unemployed, it will become more difficult for self-employed people to earn and save sufficiently to be able to retire.

Add to that a global pension crisis that is still unravelling and we have a recipe for real problems. In an article – ‘The Demographic Shape of Things to Come’ (Global Agenda Magazine) written in 2004, Adair Turner, Head of the UK Pensions Commission warned that “the world is relentlessly getting older with good and bad consequences.” Traditionally it has been those of working age who pay the pensions of the retired. For twentieth century pensions “the relationship of contribution levels to benefit levels was only sustainable on the assumption that each generation was larger than the one before”. The ratio between those aged 20 – 64 and those 65 or over is falling worldwide – the result of better healthcare and falling birth-rates, he notes and that puts pensions at risk.

Many companies in the UK have already closed their final salary (defined benefit) pension schemes to new members and some have closed down altogether. A report published in October,2004 by the UK Pensions Commission suggests that those that still exist could suffer a major shortfall. A shift to defined contribution schemes that depend on investments to purchase a pension on retirement and a trend to lower employer contributions lead to a potential gap between savings and pension needs of £30 - £60 billion in the UK (Sunday Times – 22/5/05).

Adair Turner at one stage suggested that knowledge workers might need to retire at 70 though this suggestion was quickly withdrawn. For many of us, retirement will not be an option at all. There is no guarantee of, or indeed desire for, state support for those affected by this. So here is where a social support network will come into its own helping people with coping, finding work and earning and balancing their work with other activity.

There is a wealth of experience in the grey heads and the numbers of older people will continue to grow relative to the younger age groups, so older workers should find that their expertise and their labour comes back into demand.

A number of initiatives already exist. The Silver Fox Network , set up by Dr Gerry Lemberg and Ian Coburn, aim to capitalise on the skills and experience of older workers in supporting new enterprise. Mike Burnage is setting up the Wisdom Bank to match ‘wisdom givers’ with ‘wisdom seekers’ after realising that “retiring at 65 without an interest could cut your life short”. Jim Tuffin is encouraging the ‘near retired’ to network with those who can use their skills and experience – perhaps for money and perhaps purely for participation and involvement.

These initiatives are underpinned by the existence of Social Business Networks such as Ecademy . There the development of friendships and support networks is encouraged to handle the important issues of emotional wealth whilst allowing work and available people to find each other to develop business. Since its inception over 7 years ago, Ecademy has lived the principle of people first, trade later – or to put it another way ‘Winning by Sharing’.

Posted by Andy Coote

Useful Reference Sources:

www.oscarbrownjr.com/WebPagesUS/poems.htm
www.thetimes.co.uk
www.globalagendamagazine.com/2004/adairturner.asp
www.pensionscommission.org.uk/publications/2004/annrep/index.asp
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1622625,00.html
www.silverfoxnetwork.com/
www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=47330
www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=44055
www.ecademy.com

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Friday, August 19, 2005

Freeforming And Matching - Signs Of The New Economy

In my previous blog, I talked briefly about the trend for companies to do more with less employees - and how this will lead to the growth of a self-employed class of professionals Richard Duvall of Zopa referred to as ‘freeformers’.

This view of our present - and our future - is supported by research by ethnographic researcher Bruce Davis “who studies people - families, couples and individuals - from all walks of life and from different parts of the country” notes a research document from Zopa.

“Rather than use interviews to discover people’s attitudes, Bruce’s work is based on long periods of observation of people as they go about their everyday lives.” From his recent research, Bruce notes that our ways of earning money have changed and that we have become “more fluid and complex” in our needs of and uses for money.

Our values are changing too. Chantal Benjamin , Manager of Communications for BBC Audience and Consumer Research noted recently that 54% of social groups A and B now want fulfilment above wealth and property.

How will our working lives change as a result?

We will work for more employers and for shorter periods. The model will be most reminiscent of the movie business where teams of independent workers and small firms come together - often in a company specific to a single film - and work together towards a set of well-defined outcomes.

At the end of the process, they go their separate ways to other projects, and to look for the next opportunity.

It has been said that search is the ‘killer app’ on the Internet but search without finding is of little use to most of us.

The main successes of the Internet era, Google , Yahoo , eBay and Amazon are all matching engines. Google and Yahoo match you to information you need, eBay matches buyers and sellers, and Amazon matches you to books and - increasingly - to a wide range of consumer goods. Zopa has been launched to match lenders (that is individuals with money to lend) to borrowers without the need for a banker in the process.

In the freeform world, freelance workers will need to be matched to suitable work.

Unlike traditional recruitment, the need for a quick and accurate match will be paramount. Project owners will need to find whole teams or specific skilled individuals, whilst individuals will be looking for a continuity of work that fits their lifestyle AND their need for fulfilment in equal measure.

Social business networks will need to become the matching engines of the freeform generation. They should provide project owners with the ability to define opportunities and freelance workers with the ability to specify their needs and skill sets. Then the network can match their requirements and send offers to the freelancers that they may choose to take up. It’s a Buyers and Sellers market and it is often as hard to buy (that is to find a scarce resource) as it is to sell.

The day will come, I believe, when you can log onto LinkedIn or openBC or Ecademy and there, in your inbox, will be the offers of work that you need for the next three to six months.

I see that my job is not just to have a pretty website and offline events with Chardonnay, but to put work on every members table internationally.

Global Labour Matching in real-time is the future of work and the future of Ecademy. These are the challenges facing us all in networking today and new challenges will bring forward new solutions.

This article can be found at http://afriendineverycity.com/. The author has chosen to accept comments from fawning lickspittles only. This blog provides some balance.

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Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Networking — why quality emerges from quantity

Whenever business people get together and talk about networking and how it might improve their business, one of the more emotive topics will always be quality versus quantity. The quality brigade will insist that it is important to know who it is you’re talking before making a connection. They are looking for the right match to their requirements.

To those who know me, it will come as no surprise that I prefer making random connections and that I have no limits on the number of connections I’m prepared to make. In my working lifetime, I have met with 23,000 people and connected online with thousands more. Not all of those people have become close friends or even regular acquaintances but enough have for me to believe that quality can emerge from quantity.

“Technology can help you maintain a high touch relationships with a large number of people. But just how large should that number be?” ask Scott Allen and David Teten in a Fast Company article in January this year. Their conclusion is that “the number of your relationships and the average strength of your relationships end up being inversely proportional. The more people you know, the less well you know them. If you want to build stronger relationships, you’re going to have to do so with a smaller number of people. You can spend all of your time with your close friends and family (strong ties, low number), or spread yourself across a wide number of people (weak ties, high number). However maintaining both high strength and high number is physically impossible”.

Christian Mayaud, a expert networker and Venture Capitalist in the US, categorises your network into PANs, CANs and FANs. In his blog “Sacred Cow Dung“, Mayaud explains that PAN = potentially active network; CAN = currently active network and FAN = formerly active network. He argues that the CAN for most people will be around 200 to 300 people whilst ” my FAN rose in normal course of working with different people and companies at different times in my career (currently about 50K), it’s my PAN that I don’t mind growing online (I never presume to know a priori whether or not I can be helpful to someone someday about something that comes up ie I don’t feel I have any basis to judge the “quality” of a potential relationship a priori).

Often the difference between meeting someone and connecting with them can be a matter of the state of mind of one or both of the parties. Being open to connection is about being interested in the other person and finding out as much as you can about them. There are questions you can ask that will help identify how you can help them. For example “what is your expertise?”, “what projects are you working on a present?” and “what contacts are you looking for to help you develop your business?” In an initial meeting, concentrate on the needs of the person in front of you and ask for nothing for yourself.

Maybe you believe that you have the network you need and have no need of further connections. You may be right but it is important to remember that stagnant networks occur when there is no new blood flowing through them.

Despite those who would seek to convince you that it is all about the apparent quality of the person you are connecting with, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it is really all a numbers game. Reed’s Law suggests that each new addition to the network (node) increases the potential connections within that network exponentially. So, arguably, everybody gains from having a larger network. The money, as I have often said before, is in the links and not the nodes.

The person in front of you also brings with them a variety of friends and contacts who by definition are unknown to you on first meeting. So when someone talks about a quality contact, you have to ask yourself if they mean the person themselves or that person’s contacts because neither judgment is one that you can make that quickly. “Like a tree”, notes Roger Hamilton of XL Results Foundation, “fruit only grows on the outermost twigs” which may be 2 or 3 degrees removed from the person in front of you.

Thomas Friedman notes in his 2005 book “The World is Flat” that technology has made it possible for companies to do more with less employees by outsourcing and offshoring their businesses. It is unlikely that this trend will reverse and more people will find themselves as what the new Internet lending and borrowing exchange Zopa refer to as “freeformers”. These are people who have chosen, or have had to choose, a portfolio career working often from home. As more professional workers find themselves working alone, the importance of a place where they can meet, talk, support each other and develop teams to bid for business together increases.

Ecademy is a place where you can develop your skills in networking both at local events where you can meet people face-to-face and also online where a different set of skills will be needed. It is perfectly possible to make friends with people online and to share important and intimate information with them, without “seeing the whites of their eyes”. In fact, this ability will be crucial as the world continues to flatten with the development and availability of technology. With tools like Skype and Avecomm, it is possible to telephone, videoconference, share applications and whiteboards for low or no cost worldwide. When these tools are combined with your profile on one of the Social Business Networks like Ecademy, a very productive conversation and relationship can follow.