Networking and Privilege

By Liz Ryan, 6-01-07

People who read my rants about networking and social-networking sites like LinkedIn know that I’m a “careful connector.” You can go back two or three years to my interview of Konstantin Guericke, a co-founder of LinkedIn, who said “the LinkedIn site is a mechanism for allowing people to put their existing networks of friends and colleagues online and in touch with one another.” (I’m paraphrasing Konstantin’s remarks.) This was a big statement for a founder of the world’s most successful online networking site to make, in my view. Konstantin said several times during the interview that the purpose of the site in its builders’ eyes was to automate connections among existing contacts, and to allow people who already know one another to make introductions for their friends.

Today, of course, things are different—lots of people (maybe even the majority) use sites like LinkedIn to find brand-new contacts by blasting connection invitations all over creation. That’s fine - that is their choice. No one ever forced a person to connect with an Open Connector on LinkedIn. I hold to the view that “real” connections are far more powerful—many times more significant—than connections based on the fact that, well, two people happen to be alive on Earth at the same time. But I have many friends who feel differently.

I have heard the standard Open Connector message many times over. “If I don’t connect to new people all the time, I won’t have access to the full power of the enormous LinkedIn database.” “I need to source candidates and the only way I can do that is to be connected on LinkedIn to as many people as possible.” “I use LinkedIn as a way to meet new people and grow my network—my existing network of contacts already knows all the same people I do.” I don’t use social networking that way, but I understand the logic.

This week I heard a different explanation for the Open Connector worldview, from a man who is a member of my online community called Ask Liz Ryan. He wrote to me and said (I’m paraphrasing again), “There are really two LinkedIn communities that exist side-by-side. One is the LinkedIn universe that Konstantin described in his interview with you. You are part of that universe, and by extension, so are your friends and colleagues.”

He went on, “The other LinkedIn universe is made up of people like me who would be essentially contact-less without the ability via a site like LinkedIn to create business connections. There are a few reasons why I don’t have a sturdy off-line network to import to LinkedIn. I’m much younger than you and Konstantin are, for one thing. I didn’t go to an especially great college and I haven’t had jobs where I’ve met people who were successful at the time or have become successful over the years. LinkedIn for me is all about starting a network. If you have the advantage of a wonderful network at the time you join LinkedIn, then you have the luxury of using LinkedIn in the way that Konstantin described, to enrich and cross-connect the network you brought with you. But if you’re like me, you don’t have that privilege.”

This argument makes sense to me in one respect—if you can’t bring people with you to LinkedIn (either inviting your off-line friends to join the site, or finding people on LinkedIn whom you already know and connecting to them) then you’re pretty much an island unto yourself. That won’t do you any good on a power-of-connections site like LinkedIn. But can’t you also cultivate an offline network in the traditional way (going to events, meeting people through your friends, etc.) and bring those folks to your LinkedIn network? I asked the gentleman this question, in an email message.

“I can do those things of course,” he wrote. “But that is an incredibly slow process. I don’t disagree with you that true-blue, time-tested relationships have more weight than a casual acquaintance you make online—most of the time. But for someone like me, it’s either new, online connections or none at all. I don’t have five or ten years to invest in building my trusted-colleague network. Shouldn’t a site like LinkedIn break down the traditional old-boy (or old-girl) networking paradigm and let us all have equal access to one another?”

I’m not sure I agree with the equal access to one another thing—that is, access is great, but I’m not likely to connect to everyone who approaches me and wants to connect, or even to have coffee - as much as I love coffee, there’s just not enough time. Every human being presumably has some gating mechanism for evaluating out-of-the-blue overtures, whether it’s the contents of a person’s bio or his or her tone of voice (or email message) or some other factor.  But I understand what my correspondent is saying. He wants LinkedIn to be a leveler, to let people who don’t have ten or twenty years of business experience and well-established friends and strong networks to have some of the benefits that have traditionally been associated with time in the working world and grey hair. That can’t be a bad thing.

But will we all burn out on the hyper-drive hail-fellow-well-met frantic contact acquisition that a site like LinkedIn promotes, very soon? I am already contacted-out, and I know there are hundreds of thousands or millions of fascinating people out there, but I’m way too tired to reach out to them. Does the universe intend for every single person to have contact with every other single person, like Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame re-imagined as one-on-one interactions?

I was grateful to the young man for sharing with me his view that Open Connecting confers on limited-network or network-less users the ability to quickly gather together a bit of the “contact privilege” that other people acquire by working in x number of companies for y number of years. I’m not sure the benefits will be exactly the same, but I can’t blame the fellow for trying. What is your view?