When we hear the phrase “net worth,” it is almost always in reference to someone’s financial position. That is, what is the value of someone’s assets minus liabilities? While that is a good thing to know for oneself, I believe the phrase can be used in a new way now that personal networks are such a vital part of our lives.
The idea for this post came from seeing a tweet by Dan Pontefract (@DPontefract) on January 25 that said, “my network *is* my net worth.” The tweet linked to the press release “Most Expect to Get New Job by Networking” from Right Management, the workforce consulting experts within ManpowerGroup. The release discusses survey results which showed that 50% of respondents expect to find their next job via networking, while 22% expect to do so through a job board, 10% through an agency/recruiter, 8% by directly approaching businesses and 1% through a newspaper or periodical (how are newspapers still in existence?).
As someone who puts great value in his personal network of personal and professional contacts, I resonate with the survey results and am surprised, frankly, that the 50% figure wasn’t higher. Give it a year or two and I’m confident it will be much higher.
As I think about the value of a personal network, the primary benefit for me is not for job searching. It is for learning. For the past few years, the primary way I have learned is by following key people on Twitter who are leaders in fields I care about. The blogs, reports, white papers, surveys, infographics, books and articles these people link to, their insights shared, and the incredible opportunity to have direct online conversations with them make the world of knowledge available to everyone who chooses to take advantage of the social technologies at their fingertips.
Learning professionals talk about personal learning networks as sources for individuals to learn via informal connections with others. If you’re interested, grab your favorite beverage, do a Google search on the topic and spend some time perusing the 147 million search results on the term.
Personal networks consist of connections you have with people you see in person as well as others online you may never have met face to face. Personal networks are not the same thing as online social networks, although the people you connect with online are part of (and perhaps the largest part of) your personal network.
I encourage everyone to continually work on expanding their personal network – their “net worth” – both for the value you can bring to them and for the opportunities such connections bring your way. Don’t expand your networks just to take without giving, though. That’s against the spirit of a true network where each person plays an important part. Expand because you have a thirst for knowledge, a desire to help as many others as possible, a yearning to expand your horizons through rich communication with others around the world, and you will find that you end up gaining as much or more than you give in the process.
You may have additional reasons for and uses of a personal network beyond the professional and learning focus that most interests me. Regardless of your motivation, I encourage you to pause and ask yourself “What is my ‘net worth’? What can you do today to increase it?”
Very few days go by without someone complaining to me about something happening in our company’s internal social network. Usually it’s about a specific discussion that someone takes offense at or because they think a rule or two have been broken that requires my intervention as community manager. That goes with the territory of managing a community of 23,000 people that posts over 1,000 messages a day. Given the activity level, the number of complaints is remarkably low.
One of the facts of life in a small or new business is doing a lot of things yourself. You usually don’t have the resources to hire expensive consultants, marketing agencies, graphic artists or others to do work. You may begrudge not being able to hire out such work, but you shouldn’t be too quick to pass it on to others outside the business.
One of the online conversations today at work dealt with the differences between face-to-face and online communication. It should be obvious to most that there are major differences between the two, but our actions don’t always indicate an awareness of those differences.
I received a call at work yesterday about a post that was on our company’s internal social media platform. The initial post was negative, but the situation prompting the post resulted from a mistake that was easily corrected. The lady calling me had been asked to call and inquire about the possibility of deleting the discussion thread now that the matter was resolved. She rightly assumed that we don’t delete threads just because they are negative in nature, and she was actually confirming that practice with me so that she could go back to the ones who requested the deletion and let them know.
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If you watched Nik Wallenda walk his tightrope across Niagara Falls earlier this week, you were probably amazed like me that anyone would be brave or dumb enough to try it, and that anyone would succeed at it. It was an amazing feat. The man is skilled at what he does because he’s been doing it all his life.
With the growth of Facebook to over 800 million users and showing no sign of going away anytime soon, we have a new element in our relationships that simply didn’t exist too many years ago. We have the ability to easily stay in touch – even to the finest level of detail – with whomever we wish. We can choose to maintain relationships from years past where geography and circumstances would previously have ended regular contact. We can, in a sense, live with many others every day to stay in touch and to at least be up to date on those aspects of their lives they choose to make public.
Like much of the rest of the world on January 1, I can’t help but reflect on the past and look forward to the future. When I think of this blog and where I’d like for it to go, there are two major things I can do to improve.
