Strategic Social Networking

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development   Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

These days, most people will have some kind of social networking presence--and from a professional standpoint, that probably means a profile on LinkedIn. I am sure that many of you also have Facebook or similar accounts, but let’s make a sweeping generalization and exclude those as “personal” social networking as opposed to the more business-focused offering from LinkedIn (there are a couple of other LinkedIn-like sites, but as LinkedIn dominates the market that’s where I am concentrating for the purposes of this article).

I am often approached by people who have a LinkedIn profile but who complain that it isn’t “working”--they have a relatively high number of connections but they aren’t seeing the results that they expected. They aren’t always clear on exactly what they were expecting--multiple job offers, someone to catch up with over lunch or something else.

So how do you make social networking work for you?

Intelligent connections
A lot of people seem to use the number of connections that they have as some kind of “score”. They try to connect with as many people as possible for no apparent reason other than a desire to increase their total. I routinely receive requests to connect from people that I have never heard of, and whose background and experience makes it clear that I could not …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.