The influence of networking: Freemasonry versus LinkedIn

The Economist has two excellent articles on the emergence of online business networks such as LinkedIn and Xing, and the role they play versus that of traditional business networks like freemasons, Rotary clubs and alumni organisations. The articles are here and here*.

I’ve written quite a lot about the growing influence of LinkedIn, or rather its enablement of the transmission of influence. The Economist helps to put this in context. Indeed Influencer50 has found, in its research projects, that although LinkedIn has increased its role in identifying clusters of influencers, it is a poor substitute for influence in the real world. LinkedIn’s strength, the ability for any mutually agreeable people to connect, is its weakness – there’s little mandated validation of a person’s character and you may not, in fact, know the person you connect to. We don’t use LinkedIn and other networking sites to determine influence.

We talked about this in the book. It’s too easy to fake online connections, or to artificially inflate the number of connections beyond your actual influence. Very few people are genuine connectors, about 3% of people. The rest are name gatherers with little influence. The few super-connectors I know personally don’t use LinkedIn much, as it exposes their network to strangers. They use a Rolodex.

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