I think one of the challenges with social media is learning how to turn your online network into an actual network. While it’s true that many of the people you’ll connect to online are people you might also see offline, not everyone you connect to is someone you see regularly. So the challenge that arises is how to become more than just an internet connection to someone.
Recently I’ve begun paring down my Linkedin connections. While I appreciate that a lot of people have chosen to connect with me, beyond being a number in my connections list, I don’t know most of them or how they will actually be meaningful to my life. So to determine if there is a possibility of a real relationship, I’m writing to my connections and asking them to tell me about themselves and what their needs are.
I’m not writing to them to solicit them, but I do want to know who they are, what’s important to them, and if I can help them in any way, shape, or form. Maybe I can connect them to someone I know or maybe I can answer a question, but I want to be more than a number and I also want them to be more than a number.
I also figure that if someone doesn’t write back, they probably aren’t interested in actually connecting with me in a meaningful way, so I’m willing to let them go as a connection, because I know nothing will come of a connection where I am just a number to someone else.
The challenge of turning an online network into an actual network is that the people you connect with have to be people with real needs so that you can really network with them. By writing a message to a person I’m connected to on Linkedin, my hope is that I’ll actually discover their needs and also become a person to them. My hope is that we’ll actually start networking for real instead of just accumulating numbers.
What about you? What makes a connection on any online site into a person who you are learning more and networking with?
