Billy McDermott is a master networker in person — probably the most connected guy in Queens, New York, co-chairing the Queens Chamber of Commerce’s Communications and Public Affairs Committee and being honored as the 2002 Queens Businessperson of the Year. If anyone knows the value of face-to-face networking, Billy does.

A few months ago, he read about online social networking in his friend Victor Urbach’s newsletter, and decided to start exploring — not proactively at first, just out of curiosity. But he very quickly realized the enormous potential this represented, even for someone as connected as he already was.

Then Billy did something really smart — instead of coming in and just trying to apply everything he knew from his face-to-face experiences, he recognized it is a new area of mastery and looked around to find the people with wisdom to share with him. Everybody loves an eager student, and he very quickly connected with Thomas Power, Andrew Kraft, and yours truly. He picked up our book and Thomas Power’s book, and devoured them. In next to no time, he was “in” with the best-connected people online.

He’s written up his experiences so far on Ecademy, LinkedIn, and Ryze. A great read if you’re new to this topic, or just unconvinced about the whole practice or any of these sites in particular.

On Ecademy:

Why Ecademy? Several of my friends have asked me that question. It seems too British, too U.K., they say. Precisely is my answer. One word – Global!
…
For the last three mornings I have awakened to many posts from my new friends at Ecademy, including Thomas Power. Because of the time difference and so few U.S members, the site goes silent during my evening and awakens while I am fast asleep. It was always a goal to wake up with orders. Already, I am working a woman who wants me to help her market product.

On LinkedIn:

I have spent over six years in the Internet industry as a Senior Management Executive and LinkedIn is one of the very few sites I have found with the robust technology to fulfill their business plan. It is quite impressive even though it is still in late beta stage.
…
Every time someone becomes connected to you, your sphere of influence grows larger. I am convinced I shall meet more influential people in a shorter time using Social Networks such as LinkedIn on the Internet.

On Ryze:

Up until a week ago, calling Ryze “junior league at best” was being kind, or so I thought. I had met so few who had impressed me. I have only a certain amount of time in my day and I like to hang out with senior level executive types. I am not interested in the social aspect, just the Business aspect. A friend of mine, Joe Rosenberg, asked me to take another look.
…
Like anything, you must work it. When you show up in real life, opportunities present themselves. You start putting yourself out in the online community and the best find you.
…
My opinion of Ryze has changed. I probably have book marked over 500 people I wish to visit again. Yes, I visited 500 people.

Here’s some of Billy’s best advice on how (and why) to get started with online social networking:

Here is what I found. I learned that if you joined and did nothing, nothing would occur. If you did not wish to fill out your profile, why were you bothering? It was extremely difficult for me to this. I had to learn it; master it. I know what I am about, so everyone else should know it, or so I thought. But people cannot read minds. You need to fill in keywords, not phrases, as most do. Phrases are not searchable. As smart as computers are, they have no common sense and are not human. I learned a long time ago, the world is quite concrete. The more exact and specific you are, the more business will come your way. Some are vague and some tell too much. You need a healthy balance. I spent time refining and refining. If you visit my pages, it changes often. It is a work in progress.

Here is the beauty of social networks. You are on stage 24/7. You have the world at your fingertips. You do not need to show up. All people have to do is search for you. Make it easy for everyone. Put your picture up. Give them information. Tell them everything, because they really do not know. Stand out as you have competition. Visit others in your field and see what they have. Copy from the best! It took mankind more than eight years to build the Alaska pipeline and it has been spitting out oil ever since. Feed your pipeline. Do it everyday. Because it so new, you are ahead of most of the universe. You will be established when others catch on. One of the arguments about in-person business networking was you always had to be on a persons mind to be of help. If someone asked me if I knew anyone and my mind was filled with the clutter of everyday life, they lost. Really good people never got to first base. You were not on my mind. Social Networks have profiles and I can type a few keywords and there you come up. I would be honored to endorse or connect you. It jogged my memory. Every morning I wake up with more requests than I can manage. It is funny how you do manage to find the time. Now, I can sit in my home office and connect with far more people than I could ever meet face to face on a daily basis.

I strongly encourage you to read all three of Billy’s write-ups, even if you’ve already dismissed the network in question. In particular, pay attention to Billy’s technique for identifying and connecting with quality contacts on Ryze — it speaks to the value of being selective about who your virtual friends are. Billy’s now one of mine.

(And yes, we’re going to get him blogging soon…)

META Group analyst Mike Gotta offers a cautious but comprehensive view of corporate blogging. While he thinks it’s too early for organizations to commit to enterprise-wide blog rollouts, it’s time to start looking, and the business value is real:

Bottom Line: Innovative decision makers and early adopters will avoid the mistakes of the past (underestimating the impact of the Web) by allocating discretionary funding in 2004 for blog pilots as part of an iterative effort to construct a broader business case for social computing.

Business Impact: Sharing personal knowledge and enabling connections across peer groups are important best practices that improve workplace performance and innovation.

via Judith Meskill

Apparently, tech news, travel, and contemporary Scandinavian furniture.

While on Ryze tonight, I glanced at my Alexa toolbar. I was not surprised to see Ecademy, Friendster, LinkedIn, Meetup, and Tribe as related sites, but next was IKEA, followed by Expedia and Travelocity, and then CNET.

Hey, social networking site owners — pay attention! Now you know where you can get your ad revenue from.

Mobile phone users on UCLA campus are experimenting with SmallPlanet’s new CrowdSurfer technology, a social networking system that transmits relationship information up to 100 feet away using Bluetooth radio signals.

“This is going to change sociology forever,” says Vic Downing, President of the strategic advisory firm Global Advantage, Inc. The application goes well beyond the online friend of friend networking popularized by sites like Friendster and Google’s Orkut.com according to SmallPlanet CEO Hunter Heaney.

Dodgeball, which offers similar functionality, but based on different technology, has been live for a couple of months.

If you’re new to all this, here’s an excellent overview of online social networking covering (briefly) the most popular sites and some of the major issues this new phenomenon raises.

Monster.com announced May 24 their intent to buy Tickle for one million shares of stock and $29.5 million in cash.

Good move for Monster. Monster added networking functionality to their site last year, but it never really took off. Lots of activity, but not much productivity.

“Tickle’s expertise in career assessment testing, networking and matching, combined with the viral nature of those businesses, dovetails perfectly with Monster’s vast user base,” Monster CEO Andrew McKelvey said in the release. “With scientific research at its foundation, Tickle adds yet another layer to Monster’s screening and hiring tools, providing recruiters a window into a candidate’s personality and work preferences that goes beyond past achievements to who they are and their fit within the hiring organization.”

This has also prompted me to take a closer look at Tickle, which I haven’t looked at in a while. They’re shifting more towards business/career networking, and are profitable ($25 million in sales in the past 12 months), which is a good thing. More on Tickle in an upcoming post.

For this month’s LinkedIn Unleashed teleclass, Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing, asked me to set up an “exit poll” of sorts, prompting people who visit the registration page but don’t register for their feedback. Honestly, I was skeptical about the value of doing this, and what the response rate would be, but I agreed to set it up.

Turns out it’s been very enlightening, and I’m glad we did it. Some of the feedback has been great — very useful for helping us plan future events. We’ve gotten exactly what we wanted: feedback about time of day, format, length, content, pricing, etc. Several people have even written a note that they were interested, but just couldn’t attend this one and wanted to know about future ones (glad we got those!).

There are a few questions that have come up (all from people who chose to remain anonymous) that I’d like to address here:

“Why isn’t this a web seminar?”

I will be putting it on as a web seminar in the future. Outside of the tech industry, though, where web seminars are commonplace and everyone seems to be set up for them, the incidence of technical complications of some sort has consistently run at about 20% of attendees, and it hasn’t mattered which service I’ve used (I’ve worked with half a dozen). Telephones simply work. Plain HTML simply works. Since I’m not demonstrating an application, and not doing video conferencing, the benefits of a web conference over the simpler teleclass with presentation materials are minimal.

The main reason I will be offering it as a web seminar is so that we can run the audio over the internet, allowing non-U.S. attendees to participate without paying outrageous long distance charges.

“Why isn’t it free? This should really be a free event to help you promote your product.”

Quite simply, because a) it’s valuable, and b) you can’t get it anywhere else. This is not a basic how-to — it’s about how to realize business value from LinkedIn.

Just for clarification, though, I’m putting on the event, not LinkedIn. They’re co-marketing it and co-developed the curriculum. This class is my product. It took me time, effort, and money to develop and promote the class, and I deserve compensation for my efforts. Besides, LinkedIn is currently both free and ad-free.

(A variation on the above…)

“Not interested in paying to learn how to better use linkedin. I haven’t gotten benefit out of it thus far and thought it might be worthwhile learing a bit more but as I can’t see value yet, I am not interested in spending money or more importantly time, when I have no ROI.”

Quite simply, you have no “I”, therefore you have no “R”. It’s working for a lot of people — high-level executive placements, strategic partnerships, start-up funding, and more. If it’s not working for you, it’s because you don’t know how to work it. Take the class.

(This next one was really interesting…)

“I looked at Scott’s number of connections and was not impressed. I almost have as many as he does!!!”

OK, no offense, but I chuckled when I read this. Listen up, folks — It’s not about the numbers!!! I’ve been studying this intensively for nearly two years, and beyond a certain point, there is no direct correlation between the size of your network and financial success.

The strategy for every person is different — some people need bigger numbers of very weak ties, while others need smaller numbers of stronger ties. It depends entirely on the product or service you’re selling, the competitiveness of your market, and a number of other factors.

Furthermore, LinkedIn works best when it’s based on well-founded trust, not merely casual acquaintance. You can’t help make an effective connection across three or four degrees of separation unless you know the people on either side of you pretty well.

Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the number of LinkedIn connections of some of the people who understand social software extremely well — industry experts — to see just how many they had:
- Joe Bartling - 264
- Mitchell Levy - 202
- Dan Keldsen - 197
- Me - 194
- Rick Klau - 187
- Ross Mayfield - 171
- Stowe Boyd - 138

There are, of course, some higher and some lower. My point is that a lot of well-connected people who are “in the know” about social software are right in that same range.

Bottom line, though, is this: I’m saturated. I have all the opportunities I can handle. Getting “more connected” would actually be a distraction. I can’t even conceive of what my life would be like trying to process requests for 3, 5, 10 times as many people as I do already. AND, I would not be able to add value to those connection requests if I connected with people who I barely know their name. That is not an effective use of the system.

Quit trying to “super-size” your network and instead think about “right-sizing” it.

Interesting feedback, eh? I’d love to hear your comments here, or your comments on the comments.

FYI, the next class is Wednesday, May 26.

In analyzing relationships between people: What distinguishes a strong tie from a weak tie?

- Age of the relationship. Have you known the person for a long time?
- Frequency of contact. The amount of time you two spend together.
- Emotional attachment. Do you care about the other person?
- Reciprocity. Do you regularly do random acts of kindness for your tie, and do they regularly do random acts of kindness for you?
- Kinship. Even if you do not see your cousin very often, you still likely have a strong tie to him because of your family bond.

Weak ties are usually only activated for a specific purpose, rather than being part of a multi-layered emotional relationship. The manager of your corporate mail room is likely a weak tie to you. You interact with her because you need something from her; you need your package weighed. You usually do not interact with her except for that purpose.

Although your weak ties can produce great value, it is typically the strong ties that provide you with a sense of companionship, comfort, and security. Stronger does not mean more valuable or “better” . Strong and weak, in this context, simply imply different types of relationships.

We recommend building a portfolio of both strong and weak ties. Strong ties require that you invest significant amounts of time. We recommend making that investment with your family, boss, immediate colleagues, and a few selected other people. That sturdy infrastructure is critical, particularly when you are under stress.

You only have time and attention to handle a few strong ties. According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar , and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the human brain is hard-wired to handle a maximum of about 150 active social connections. In addition to the time requirements to maintain those relationships, they occupy space in our mind even when we are not in contact with them. Even with electronic tools, it is extremely difficult to sustain more than about 150 strong ties. Fortunately, electronic tools such as contact managers and online social networks allow us to develop a much larger network of weak ties. They relieve our brains of some of the workload of maintaining all those relationships.

Feedback welcome.

This useful Blog Software Breakdown displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison.

Via my colleague, Rodney Lui of Nitron Advisors.

Professor Wayne Baker, in his excellent book Achieving Success Through Social Capital: Tapping the Hidden Resources in Your Personal and Business Networks, lays out the business case for the importance of social networks. He summarizes the empirical evidence demonstrating the many benefits of social capital to individuals and to organizations:

● Getting a job: More people find jobs through personal contacts than by any other means.

● Pay and promotion: People with rich social capital are paid better, promoted faster, and promoted at younger ages.

● Influence and effectiveness: Those who become central in an organization’s networks are more influential and even paid better, compared with those who occupy peripheral network positions.

● Venture capital and financing: 75% of startup-ups and new businesses find and secure financing through the informal investing grapevine: the social networks of capital seekers and investors. Companies that develop personal relationships with their bankers get financing at lower rates, compared with companies that maintain an arms-length relationship.

● Organizational learning-and doing: As much as 80% of learning in the workplace takes place via informal interactions.

● Word-of-mouth marketing: Advertising increases awareness of products and services, but personal referrals and recommendations lead to the actual decisions to purchase them. Any salesperson will testify that the majority of sales come through that salesperson’s network, not unsolicited.

● Strategic alliances: The more strategic alliances a company creates, the more it will create in the future.

● Financial stability: Bankruptcy is less likely for firms with well-connected executives and board members, even controlling for many other explanations.

● Democracy: Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found in his twenty-five year study of democracy in Italy that those regions with rich social capital enjoy strong economic development and responsive local governments, but regions with poor social capital suffer.