In this post I expand on the third tip in my series 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business: Build New Networks

In that initial, overview post I wrote about building new networks:

As my handwritten scrawl shows, the first version of this was “Build your networks”. The trouble is, while the networks we have now might sustain us for a while, our new business focus may demand, not that we trash our existing networks, but that we complement it with new networks relevant to our marketing strategy.

If you are starting your business now or giving it a re-boot, social media offers you literally unprecedented opportunities to build amazing new, and amazingly profitable, networks.

Facebook network, first 100, via TouchGraph

I am not for a moment minimizing the importance of existing networks. Just the other day I was reflecting on the fact that a large proportion of my business over the past 20+ years has come, directly or indirectly, through networks I already had way back when I first set up my consultancy business, literally from my kitchen table. Which means that network has been worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to me.

Our old networks may not serve us adequately into the future

The networks we have when we leave the corporation or the government office may well deliver us plenty of business for a while, and hopefully for a long time. As I have just indicated, I have been fortunate. On the other hand, we need to accept that after a period of time those networks may not be able to deliver as they could before.

Ever go back to a place or group where you used to be a “somebody” and see no one you know or who knows you?

We need to keep building our networks and be careful not just to stick with the ones we know.

As my good friend and master networker, Bill Vick, likes to say about networking, you should dig the well before you are thirsty.

And it’s not just about networking with potential clients. That is thinking much too narrowly. We need to build professional networks in fields where we would like to work and do business. That includes networking with our competition.

For instance, I have a network of coaching colleagues now, which did not exist before 2002 and one in social media, a network which did not exist for me before 2003. I could think of many of those people are competitors. I choose to think of them as colleagues.

And in fact those networks have been immensely valuable in terms of building my business, as well as in providing me with new, trusted friendships and professional alliances. Not least, they have also provided me with opportunities to serve the community, in various not-for-profit organizations within those networks.

I also have a network, small so far, of business colleagues in China or who are very experienced and knowledgeable about business in China.

It gives me great confidence to be able to tell clients that if I don’t know the answer to a question I can probably find someone in my network who does.

Look for scope to expand specific networks

As our business grows and changes, and as we get clearer about what we really want to be doing and the areas we want to focus on, it is a good idea to look at our networks and see where we need to do some more sowing and nurturing to make particular parts of our network grow.

There are now some great visualization tools that can help us with that.

As well as TouchGraph which produces visualizations of your Facebook network, as above, one tool that seems to offer scope for some interesting analysis and strategizing, is the LinkedIn Maps tool from LinkedIn Labs, which produces visualizations like the one below. I’m just familiarizing myself with this but already I can see some scope for thinking about my network and taking some strategic action to expand it in various sectors.

I haven’t figured out the key to the clustering of several groups under various colors. It does look as if:

the pink group, bottom right, is a coaching sub-network
a small, light orange group top right is a China network
the reasonably large, orange group, bottom center, is pretty certainly a social media network

Still working on the others, but the power for me of this kind of visual presentation is that it raises questions which I can usefully address in working out my own roadmap for engagement via LinkedIn for the next year and beyond.

For example, should I be looking to build a bigger coaching network, or say a bigger China network, and how would such decisions relate to and serve my business objectives?

Share your story

I would love to hear some stories of how your networks, old or new, have helped you in business. And of course I’m happy as always to respond as best I can to any questions about how to apply some of this thinking.

The series: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 1: Know Your Market Worth : Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 2: Build an Order Book: Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 3: Build New Networks: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 4: Ask for Help: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 5: Love the Business You Are In: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

We need to talk about Friends, Fans, “Likers”, Connectors and Followers

I love networking on the social web, as I do in real life. And I love having lots of friends and connections. In both realms I get great personal satisfaction out of being able to facilitate connections between people.

But I must admit that, for all that I have been participating actively online, one way or another, and in various groups, for over fifteen years, I think I still know how it all works offline better than I know how it works online.

It’s partly a problem about language.

I blame Facebook

Before Facebook I used to know what a friend was and I used to have a pretty good sense of the gradations of friendship and how types and levels of friendships can change over time. With Facebook – and other social networking platforms – the word “friend” became totally debased. A “friend” came to equal a keystroke, accepting a request from someone you did not know, and if you met them in real life might not want to even know, let alone be friends with.

And my personal belief (which I am happy to have challenged) is that once we accepted that a “friend” on Facebook was not necessarily a “friend” in the sense we were used to, an expectation built up on the social web that anyone should be willing to connect with anyone else, unless, say, they had reason to believe the other might be an axe murderer or some other unsavory type.

But for the benefit of those folks who just came in, being able to operate effectively as a business person on the social web involves, when it comes to the notion of being a friend, something akin to what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” .

With other ways of connecting online – as a “fan”, as “liking” someone or their Facebook page, as a connector or follower – there is not such a semantic challenge, but there can be a cultural challenge and for business there is a strategic business challenge.

There are two short versions of this challenge, one negative, one positive:

a) Negative: “If I decline or ignore this invitation to connect, fan, like, follow or whatever, could that be construed as offensive or arrogant and could that be bad for business?”

b) Positive: “What should my approach be to building connections on the social web, whether through initiating or responding, so that it fits my business plan strategically?”

Experts disagree with me

There are many people on various networks, some of them apparently quite successful or even extremely successful in business, who accept all or most invitations, send many invitations and pride themselves on the number of connections they have made.

I’m more selective. I have been told often by some colleagues why I am mistaken, lacking in understanding of networking, or just plain wrong. I am unrepentant and unbowed.

I am consoled by statistics such as that, at this writing, my 635 first level connections on LinkedIn connect me to 12,951,796 people in the larger LinkedIn network: enough to keep me busy.

No short answer

I don’t believe there is a short answer to all this. I believe the right answer will be the one that fits the business strategy, so your right answer will almost certainly be different from the right answer for my business or even for the business of someone else in your industry.

There is no shortage of people who will offer to show you, whether gratuitously or for a price, how to do your social networking “the right way”. My aim as a social business mentor is to help businesses work out the right strategy for themselves and build their own capability to operate effectively in this space.

In this I am guided by the aphorism (with a bit of manipulation of the gender references):

“Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day: teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” (Original author unknown)

Would you like more on this topic?

I want to do some more thinking and consider writing some more posts about this topic. If you have comments to make, want to agree, disagree, contradict, or share stories, I hope you will toss your contribution in the pot here to help me cook up something that can be useful to those of us who still, after all these years, are finding our way on the social web.

Image credit: “Good Friends, Béziers” Anne in Béziers photostream, Flickr, Creative Commons