Networking in a bad job market

Last week a guy I used to work with in the late 90’s tried to connect with me on LinkedIn. Whatever. This was the same guy who used to take credit for all my work and still had the balls to bring his kid by my cube on national Drag Your Spawn to Work day.

Because so many have lost their jobs in recent months, everyone’s seeking help. That’s why this is high time to focus on the “flip side” of networking: helping others.

Help others? Why would I want to do that?! Here are three good reasons:

1. If you concentrate on giving rather than receiving, you’ll be seen as a true corporate giant. And karma is an amazing thing! Help someone today and they’ll be a hundred times more likely to help you down the road.

2. Only the most accomplished and marketable professional could possibly have the leisure to be giving help right about now when most are scrambling to obtain assistance. So, by helping others, you distinguish yourself as successful despite the super-soft job market. It’s both ironic and sad that people prefer to help those who are already successful because they typically need less help than those lacking in good fortune.
   
   
3. It feels good to help others. At least, that’s what people who have helped others have told me.

Odd Job Nation - resources for the laid-off

Google Wave

Google is working on a Facebook killer. Whoa... very cool collaboration tools.

Digital Collaborators and Roving Nodes

The role of mobile internet access in evolving digital lifestyles is the cornerstone of the second typology of information and communication technology (ICT) users developed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.¹ The typology places ICT users into 10 groups and, notwithstanding variation among them, the groups fit into two baskets, with the groups' collective judgments on mobility being the pivot point.

[...]

Digital Collaborators: 8% of adults use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world.

For many Digital Collaborators, digital information is input into a creative process that often involves others and whose output they share with the world using the web. Members of this group can almost always get access to the internet, whether that is with an "always on" broadband connection or with an "always present" mobile device. With such robust connectivity, Digital Collaborators share their thoughts or creative content with others. Using blogs and other content-creation applications, they collaborate with others online to express themselves creatively. For Digital Collaborators, the internet can be a camp, a lab or a theater group -- places to gather with others to develop something new.

This pattern of active and continuous information exchange puts ICTs at the center of how Digital Collaborators learn, work, socialize and have fun. Most play games on electronic devices, with half playing games on the internet. At least occasionally, most of them watch TV on a device other than a traditional television set. And one-quarter have avatars that let them participate in virtual worlds. The typical Digital Collaborator is in his late 30s and has had years of online experience to hone his skills to get the most out of ICTs.

Roving Nodes: 9% of adults use their mobile devices to connect with others and share information with them.

Picture a Roving Node as a woman in her late 30s who is rarely without her smart phone, often using it to chat, but also checking email or fielding a text message. When she gets home or back to the office, she is frequently online, keeping up with email or surfing the net to get news or shop. This group is highly dependent on ICTs, and this dependence comes about from using ICTs to manage busy lives and stay in touch with others. Unlike the groups above, Roving Nodes are more hubs of information flows than sources of digital content. They are heavily reliant on all their ICTs for communicating and gathering information, but Roving Nodes are much less likely than preceding groups to blog or manage their own web pages.

Roving Nodes are happy when the cell phone rings, which sets them apart from Ambivalent Networkers. Although they like how gadgets help them share their ideas with others, it is not likely that a blog or an update to their webpage will be the means to do this. Give Roving Nodes email access, a browser and a cell phone, and they are off connecting to others and passing information along the network.

Internet typology: The mobile difference (Pew Research Center)

Related: Quiz - what kind of tech user are you?

(Unsurprisingly, I was assessed as a "digital collaborator" - I think most enrevanche readers would be.)

Facebook Group: World Leaders

Facebook Group: World Leaders (Sage Stossel, The Atlantic)

Wrecked the boat. Totaled. Everyone dead. FAIL

If Homer's Odessey Was Written On Twitter (HolyTaco.com)

He spins, he tweets, he scores

Twittering the tournaments (via TweetGrid)

The sort of groupthink that can lead an enterprise over a cliff with remarkable efficiency

[The]"old-boy" scenario raises the problem of network redundancy, when everyone in the network has longstanding bonds with everyone else in the network. While this results in a high level of trust, it also is a recipe for the sort of groupthink that can lead an enterprise over a cliff with remarkable efficiency.

Yes, you want a bunch of smart people in the room, but you don't want them to be the same smart people. The best networks--the ones that generate the most innovative thinking, that are able to keep themselves from veering too far in one direction or another--are the ones that link together multiple, overlapping clusters that collectively represent a range of perspectives and resources. The job of the person at the top is to focus the creative tension that results.

Obama seems to intuitively grasp this principle. Abner Mikva, the former Federal judge and Chicago congressman who served as an early Obama mentor recalls that from the beginning Obama would ask, "'Do you know So-and-So?'" and then Mikva would set up a lunch. But Obama went beyond merely expanding his Rolodex. He strategically reached out to people who could connect him with various groups, and then positioned himself as the link between them.

This type of positioning was key to his own meteoric rise--in social network analysis, being the bridge is where the power is: you're the guy who represents access to the other group--but it also happens to result in a framework for the kind of robust information exchange that best advances complex agendas and responds to multifaceted crises.

In the end, we don't just elect people to office. We elect their social networks--and their judgments about using (or not using) those networks to everyone's best advantage.

I was really tempted to "excerpt" the whole article. You really should go read the whole thing; Bradley Bloch is working on a system of social network analysis that has some very intriguing possibilities.

Bradley W. Bloch: All The President's Networks (Huffington Post)

In America, soon, social network finds you

Bradley Bloch has a great idea: develop social networking software that tracks the relationships of the world's movers and shakers; kind of an interactive Who's Who for the 21st century:

Last week, the New York Times reported that Rielle Hunter’s lawyer, who issued a statement in December that Hunter was not carrying John Edwards’ child, and Andrew Young’s lawyer, who shortly thereafter issued a statement that Hunter was carrying his client’s child, were not unconnected to each other. Instead, both had worked on legal cases with Fred Baron, the influential trial lawyer and former finance chairman of Edwards’ presidential campaign. The link between two supposedly independent players via a key Edwards advisor suggests that attempts to control the scandal have been much more extensive than first reported.

We would have known all this from the start if the three lawyers, like so many millions of other people, had set up profiles on a social networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook and connected to each other. But, of course, high-profile lawyers don’t tend to spend much time on such sites, and when they do, they’re not likely to announce connections they’d rather the rest of us not know about.

[...]

Most of us have our own networks of friends, classmates and colleagues – largely invisible to the outside world – that we vigorously tap when looking for a new job or trying to get our children into selective schools. Even so, we never fail to be surprised, if not shocked, when other people’s invisible connections turn out to play an important role in explaining events. We rarely think to look at the world through a network lens except when we want something or when things don’t go as we expect.

Indeed, a remarkable number of our after-the-fact analytical activities, from investigative reporting to seething about being passed over for a promotion, are ultimately attempts to piece together other people’s networks, even if we don’t always recognize them as such. We would be better off if we assumed from the start that networks and connections play an ongoing role in shaping people’s priorities and behaviors, including our own.

Taking Facebook to the Next Level (Bradley W. Bloch, Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2008)

I can't wait for the public beta. :-)

What's your network value?

Mine's $812,374.

MyNetworkValue.com

A little Quechup on your spam?

This must be some kind of new land speed record for getting spammed.

Last month, I set up a private, "secure" e-mail account, and just gave the address to friends and key business contacts. It's been working like a charm - the account works beautifully with the iPhone, and I know that every piece of mail that arrives is high-value, because I've given the address to nobody outside a tight little circle of privileged contacts.

Today, the first piece of spam arrived.

A trusted friend had included my secure e-mail in a mailshot promoting a project. No problem there; it's not a state secret, I'm just trying to keep it safe for useful communications... wish he had bcc'ed me, though.

Everyone on the mailshot who had a webmail account that autoharvests e-mail addresses for their contacts suddenly had my e-mail address. Gmail does this; Yahoo does it if asked; probably others do, too.

OK, still not a real problem there.

Then a woman I know slightly, who was on the trusted friend's mailshot (still following me?) apparently signed up for Quechup, a new social-networking site with a very underhanded modus operandi:

When you sign up, Quechup asks, as many social networking sites do, if you'd like to check your address book to see how many of your friends are already on the service (something that can be done safely at sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.)

Then guess what happens. It spams *everybody* in your freaking address book, evidently without your knowledge or consent.

Rat bastards.

I've tried to remove myself from future Quechup mailings, but with this standard of ethical behavior on their part, I'm sure my address has been sold to every Viagra spammer and Nigerian scam artist in the world by now.

Bear Stearns: Yahoo needs a social networking strategy

Courtesy of TechCrunch:

There is a bit of buzz around the presentation Bear Stearns Internet analyst Robert Peck gave a couple of days ago. It recommends a broad strategy for Yahoo to get their act together in the social networking space, and recommends a near term acquisition of one of the big players.

I’ve embedded the full presentation below. It is a broad overview of social networking in general, which Peck breaks down into four distinct types...

Collective Intelligence

Why has collective intelligence become such a big deal? With the rise of social media (wikis, social bookmarking sites and socially driven news and content aggregation sites), it seems that everyone wants to get on the bandwagon.

The principle behind collective intelligence is that a conclusion reached in collaboration with and from competition among multiple individuals will be more intelligent than any conclusion reached by an individual, no matter how smart.

Before we can harness the power of collective intelligence, we have to understand a few things.

1. What is collective intelligence?
2. Why do we need collective intelligence?
[3]. How do we harness collective intelligence?
4. How do we make sure we don’t get collective stupidity?

Lessons from the Center of Collective Intelligence (December 10, 2006)