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.

*Subscription required.

LinkedIn influence – is this for real?

So I’m cruising around LinkedIn when I spot, under the heading Viewers of this profile also viewed…, this entry:

Hillary Clinton

I admit, curiosity got the better of me so I took a quick look. It is indeed the US secretary of state and presidential candidate. On her profile, again under the Viewers of this profile also viewed… showed:

Barack Obama

Rudi Guiliana

Sarah Palin

Matt Damon

Kevin Bacon

and so on.

Is this for real? Are politicians and actors really using LinkedIn as a networking device? Mr Obama’s entry has (not surprisingly) over 500 connections.

If it’s all a spoof it’s expertly done. The understatements are wonderful: Mr Obama describes his current role as “I am serving as the 44th President of the United States of America.” Kevin Bacon is an “Independent Entertainment Professional”. There is no hint of sarcasm or irony. It could be authentic.

Is it? Can anyone confirm this?

Linked helpfully informs me, on the How you’re connected to Barack sidebar, that I’m only 3 connections away from the president of the United States. But I suspect that everyone else is too. Unfortunately, LinkedIn also notes that “Barack Obama is not currently open to receiving Introductions or InMail”

Oh well…

PS – As far as I can see our own nation’s leader, Gordon Brown, isn’t on LinkedIn. Is anyone surprised by this?

What’s the role of professional networking organisations?

I recently met up with CIO Connect, a networking organisation for (surprise) CIOs in the UK. Its value proposition is that it connects the most senior IT people in the land. It enables information sharing, the raising of individual profiles, professional development opportunities and other benefits.

I also attended a session run by the BCS on enhancing professionalism in the IT industry. The BCS is attempting to (and I’m paraphrasing liberally here) make IT practitioners as highly regarded as lawyers, accountants and other professionals (but not, one hopes, bankers…).

Both meetings left me wondering about the longevity of such professional networking organisations. Whether they are commercial businesses like CIO Connect or trade bodies like the BCS (a registered charity), I wonder at the degree of influence such organisations have, in the era of ad hoc social networking. If I can connect with a CIO directly, via LinkedIn for example, do I need CIO Connect? If I can prove my credentials because of the recommendations I have on my LinkedIn profile do I need CITP* accreditation from the BCS?

I think CIO Connect, TIF and such organisations can still add value, but increasingly this will be value to the vendor community, in brokering relationships with potential CIO-level customers. For example, CIO Connect now offers a vendor-sponsored CIOnet community in the UK, in addition to the core CIO-only service.

The BCS is struggling to introduce professionalism into businesses, yet other trades have managed this successfully. Trivial example: if you want a wood-burning stove installed in your house in the UK you should get a HETAS-accredited installer, otherwise you’ll fail building regulations (you read it here first). Yet getting my PC fixed is a lottery, with no accreditation scheme from the BCS or anyone else**. Are chimney sweeps really more of a profession than IT?

Some degree of regulatory compulsion is usually required to underwrite professionalism, but this buys trust from the public – essential in any professional body. The BCS is reluctant to go down the statutary route, and (I think) will suffer for it. At the moment it’s too easy to ignore the BCS.

How can networking organisations increase their influence and resist the diminishment of their proposition? Firstly they need to embrace the opposition – social networking. The BCS has various groups within LinkedIn that are to some degree active communities of networkers. Similarly, CIO Connect and other similar organisations have online capabilities to enable networking.

More importantly, they need to influence at a professional level. When was the last time a BCS representative appeared on the Today programme? Tony Collins, the editor at Computer Weekly, is a more regular guest commentator.

Influence often starts at home, so they need to get out more and start influencing their agenda. The secret to influencing is to deploy individuals capable of influencing. Organisations do not influence – it happens on a person-to-person basis.

This individual influencing approach is something that social media networking approaches like LinkedIn will find hard to deliver, because it’s one dimensional (ie online only). Individuals can influence online, but the most influential people influence in both online and real world situations.

And that’s the key to success, and longevity, for networking organisations.

Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

The influence of LinkedIn

We’re hiring at the moment at Influencer50. Having exhausted my small network of sales people I’ve worked with that I would hire, I thought I’d give LinkedIn a go. I’ve never really invested much time and effort in it (though I know others that swear by it).

I knocked up a quick job description and sent it, via LinkedIn, to 20 people that I thought might have some useful contacts. I could have sent it by ordinary email, but since LinkedIn’s purpose is networking, I thought recipients would (a) read it and (b) mind less than an email out of the blue.

I had eight responses. Not bad return on 20 emails. What’s more, each came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust. I was really impressed by the quality and interest of the people that came forward – presumably they’d checked us out on the web before making contact.

It’s how the web is supposed to work. It’s also how influence works, much better than blogs. The best blogs are those written collaboratively between friends or colleagues. Influence is localised around communities, or issues, or some other common ground. Like a personal network.

We hope to make a hire in the next few weeks. But I’m converted. If you’ve met me at some point in the past, watch out. Prepare to be linked.