Expand your professional contacts

I’ve written before in this space about the isolation of a CTO in most organizations. By "isolation,” I don't mean to suggest that the average CTO doesn’t interact regularly with those around him or her. However, the uniquely technical nature of a CTO’s job sometimes makes it difficult for the folks in sales, marketing, and finance to relate to the CTO's specific daily challenges. To combat this, most CTOs leverage informal personal networks they have built through the years.

Regardless of how vibrant and extensive your network is, sometimes you get stuck on an issue and can’t find the right person with the right information at the right time. That is why social networking Web sites are emerging as a vehicle to make the networking process more efficient while attempting to preserve the nature of real, trusted, one-to-one relationships.

My experience with online networking began several weeks ago when I received and accepted an invitation from a highly trusted fellow CTO to join LinkedIn . LinkedIn is a personal networking service that helps people in business connect for a variety of reasons: deal-making, job-hunting, or just simply exchanging information. Within a LinkedIn network, everyone is related by degrees. The CTO who invited me into his network was one degree from me in my network -- I know him directly. All of his first-degree contacts are two degrees from me, and I can request introductions to those second-degree contacts via my trusted CTO friend. Your personal network within LinkedIn extends all the way out to those with whom you have fourth-degree relationships, but introductions can only be made, requested, or passed along via first-degree relationships. This preserves the chain of trust, as anyone can decline to make an introduction to anyone else along the way.

After joining and adding connections to 10 people, my network swelled to more than 35,000 people. This is an unmanageable and not particularly useful number of contacts for anyone. So I searched within my own industry and the names of past employers within my network, and found dozens of former colleagues, a number of whom I had previously thought about seeking out. Within those searches, I found the names of people in my industry I would like to meet. Some had close relationships to people I already knew. It’s quite possible that these people would want to meet me at some point because we share both common challenges and common friends and colleagues. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to personal relationships, relying mostly on traditional means of maintaining and creating relationships. So this new way of using technology to map relationships and recognize connections with others was surprisingly compelling.

There are still things I don’t like about this environment, but that has less to do with software than it does with social dynamics. For instance, LinkedIn has a feature that allows users to feed their own contact databases into the system to check for matches, making the construction of personal networks simpler. This is a useful feature (I’ve used it already); however, it has the potential for abuse as different people have different definitions of what it means to “know” someone. A quick exchange of business cards in the hallway at a conference four years ago might qualify as “knowing” for one person and not for another, which could lead to some awkwardness -- but that happens in real life, too.

No technology will ever replace the process of earning trust that builds real and lasting relationships. But services such as LinkedIn can definitely help you connect your business-relationship dots and find people who share your business challenges -- and more importantly, your friends.