Happy New Year! Is one of your resolutions to get - and stay - better connected professionally and personally? If my in-box is any indication, a ton of people have made the same resolution. I've been flooded over the past couple of weeks with invitations to connect on www.LinkedIn.com, www.pulse.plaxo.com, www.twitter.com, and the usual Facebook and MySpace.com.
Here's my prediction for 2008: people who weren't early adopters of networking online will gravitate to some of the newer online tools like www.pulse.plaxo.com in an effort to be among the first to climb aboard the NBT (next big thing). These people will send countless invitations and start building big databases, but many will soon lose interest or move on to something else. Online networkers can be rather fickle...and irritating when they go about trying to link to as many people as they can, whether they know them or not.
Don't get me wrong: I love networking and am a huge fan of LinkedIn, as I've noted here before. But I'll be darned if I'm going to get connected with people through multiple systems, especially since (so far) everyone who has contacted me through Pulse and Twitter in particular are already connected to me elsewhere. I don't see the point. I have no desire to combine my personal and professional connections (supposedly the selling point of Plaxo). I can't imagine a time when I'll want to "Twitter" with people... I view it as being for people with too much time on their hands or an inflated view of how interesting daily life is (theirs or mine).
I think it makes a lot more sense to pick a professional networking system and a personal one and learn to use them really well so you can be efficient and effective. This business of being connected just to be connected misses the whole point of networking, which is PURPOSEFUL connection.
So, while I want to encourage anyone reading this to always keep in mind the importance of networking, I hope you'll give some thought to putting a strategy behind it. Thoughts?
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