Your best network contacts?

Take a minute to write down the names of your five best contacts.

When you've done, scan the list and notice if they belong to particular groups or categories.  For example, are any of these five your family?  Or are they famous? Are they work colleagues? Do all five belong to a particular group?

Now I didn't give you a definition for "best" so you had to make some assumptions of what best meant to you.   When you reflect on the assumptions you made, notice what this tells you about this particular network grouping.

Now add your next best five names to your list.

When you have done, once again notice the groups that all ten belong to.  How many subgroups are there in all?  Is this group of people that know you very diverse or just representative of one or two groups?
As we will see in future posts, it is often not the size of a network that counts but it's diversity or structure.

Taking your original list of five names, count the number of connections amongst your connections.  They all know you, but how many of these five know each other.  The maximum number of relationships amongst these is 10.  How many did you score?

If none of your contacts knows each other this is an example of a very open or entrepreneurial network.  If all of these contacts know each other your network is very dense.  Neither of these situations is particularly or necessarily bad - it really depends on what you need your network for as we will see in future posts.

Comments

[Coleen Davis]

Derek,

Why would someone want to say that certain people were more valuable from a networking perspective than others? Does it help them to do so?

Since perception tends to become reality, why not presume that every person in one's network or value web is unique, different, special, and happy to offer or accept help?

You may want to add a tip or two to this posting so that readers have a reason to read the follow on blogs. Hopefully, this is food for thought.

Take care,

Coleen