Chapter 5
Working Your Network
In This Chapter
Making professional connections
Looking professional online
Cultivating connections
Building your network for social collaboration has a lot in common with building your network on LinkedIn, the public social network for professional networking often associated with recruiting and job hunting. A social collaboration network is another tool for professional networking, but the goal is to make you more effective in your current job.
Within a social collaboration network, you build connections to keep yourself informed about what’s going on within the company but also to meet people who can be helpful in the future (or who may need your help). In both contexts, you want to project a positive, professional image.
Making and Cultivating Connections
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman says the best way to build a professional social network is to start with your allies — the people you turn to regularly for advice and guidance. This may include old college friends and respected former co-workers. Digital collaboration may be the least significant aspect of your relationship with these people because they are true friends whom you get together with in person whenever possible.
Within a corporate social network, your natural allies may include co-workers, peers in other departments, your supervisor, and subordinates. Regardless of whether they are friends outside of work, they are people you know well and work well with. You use the digital network to work with them on shared documents and team projects because they are your most frequent collaborators, but you also interact in many other ways.
Where social collaboration becomes more important is with the maintenance of weaker, more casual connections.
Here’s how that may work: You meet someone interesting, in person or online, start “following” them (essentially, subscribing to their social collaboration updates), and wind up connecting with other people from their network. You find a document that’s highly relevant to your work and follow the link back to the author so you can keep tabs on anything new he posts on the subject. Over time, you may converse with these people online, connect with them in person as the opportunity arises, and turn them into closer connections.
The extended connections you establish beyond your circle of close friends, co-workers, and allies are known in social networking theory as weak ties. Weak ties are important because you can have a lot more of them, and digital social networks allow you to keep track of many more of these people than you can in your head. Even if we don’t remember each other at first glance, our respective social profiles are packed with reminders, including the mutual contacts who can vouch for us. These aren’t people who would lay down their lives for you or stake their reputations on your reliability. Still, they have enough nodding familiarity with you to do you a casual favor or make an introduction to someone who can help you with your project or cut through layers of bureaucracy. You, of course, would do the same for them.
Professional social networking is about knowing people who know people as much as it is about knowing people with specific technical knowledge. Even when they don’t know the answer to a question or the solution to a problem, people with extensive networks know where to turn. They understand the organization and its politics. They know how to get things done.
You may or may not be able to turn yourself into one of those people, but if not, you want to be connected to people like that. Here are some guidelines for getting connected:
Start with your existing connections. The best way to build your network is a little at a time but steadily. In the beginning, you’ll probably start with a handful of network connections. Some systems will automatically assign you a starter set of digital relationships based on a company org chart. If that’s not automatic, start by making sure you have the appropriate connections to your supervisor, subordinates, and the co-workers you collaborate with more frequently.
Watch the activity stream. Watch for patterns of interaction between others on the social collaboration network, looking for those who are well connected or well informed about the business in general or specific facets you’re interested in.
Search for people with specific knowledge or skill sets. If your collaboration network includes a good search tool, use it to find content on the topics you care about and trace it back to the author or authors. To the extent that people have fleshed out their profiles and tagged them properly (which they don’t always), you may find experts and other good connections that way.
Try to think ahead to the connections you may need someday, based on the sorts of work you’re doing or planning to do, as well as your career path and ambitions.
Seek introductions. Most social collaboration network profiles allow you to see who your connections are connected to, and some of those people should probably be your connections, also. Browsing contacts lists on profiles is one way of finding potential connections. Following the stream of social interactions from your contacts will also let you see who their best contacts are.
Be polite, but don’t be shy. The point of a social collaboration network is to build connections throughout the workforce. Colleagues are unlikely to object to you following them or reaching out to make a connection, particularly if you show yourself to be a productive member of the community who helps others as you would like to be helped.
Returning the favor
Typically, employee social networks don’t require reciprocal connections where a contact is established only if both parties agree to it in the mode of Facebook friendship or LinkedIn professional connections. The IBM Connections social collaboration software does support the concept of inviting other users to join your network. If they agree, the effect is similar to you following them and them following you back. But you can also follow people, rather than sending a connection invitation.
Even when they aren’t enforced by the platform, reciprocal behaviors are still a good idea in the world of network building. If someone follows you, you should follow her back, more often than not. In addition to doing this as you go along, you may want to periodically review your network to see who is following you whom you may want to follow in turn. Figure 5-1 shows how you can browse a listing of your followers in NewsGator.
If someone shares or comments on your content, look for opportunities to return the favor. However, don’t be phony about it. If you’re clicking Like and Share in response to content that you don’t actually like and that members of your network are unlikely to want to have shared with them, you can hurt rather than help your online reputation.
Beyond returning the favor, you should proactively offer help to the people in your network — helping others as you would like to be helped. Again, that can mean liking or sharing the content they post. It can also mean answering their questions or introducing them to someone who would be likely to have the answer.
By being a good citizen of the network, you build your online reputation and political capital for the day when you’re the one who needs questions answered or messages spread throughout the organization.
Figure 5-1: Review your network to see who is following you.
Cultivating connections
Good connections deserve to be cultivated. You cultivate your network of connections by keeping it growing and healthy.
Eliminate gaps. Pay attention to the mix of connections you have as well as whether there are gaps, such as new co-workers whom you’ve not yet connected with online. Perhaps they need you to show them what the collaboration network is good for.
Reinforce casual connections. If you build an extensive social network at work, you won’t be tightly connected to all those people. Remember that part of the point of an online social network was to allow you to establish more weak ties, or casual connections.
Even casual connections need to be reinforced, however, or they wither away to nothing. In everyday use, the social software environment gives you the tools to keep in touch with those more casual contacts. When they post something, you can Like it or share it (when appropriate) just to stay on their radar.
Build stronger connections with your best allies. There may be other contacts you want to cultivate more actively: say, people you work with or would like to work with but don’t see every day. Even if they haven’t posted lately, find an excuse to mention them in your posts or send them a message. Ask their advice, showing that you respect their opinion. If you don’t work in the same location but have an excuse to visit, consider asking them to lunch.
Throughout this chapter, I make several references to connecting with people who share your expertise or interests. One of the ways how a social network can be most valuable is in helping you connect with expertise you lack and answers to questions you didn’t even anticipate you’d need.
This is where having a sizable and robust network becomes very valuable. You can ask your own network of contacts the big question, and maybe you’ll get lucky and have someone who knows the answer already connected to you.
Maybe a search of the social network will turn up someone with the right expertise. Often, though, the human social network is more powerful. Post your question to the social network stream, and you may get (if not an answer) an introduction to someone who probably knows the answer. What works even better is reaching out to the people you know — the people whose relationships you’ve cultivated — until you know a little bit about what and whom they know.
With a strong network, even if you don’t know who to ask, you will know who would know.
Looking Professional Online
You should dress up your profile the way you dress yourself for success in the workplace. At a bank or other traditional organization, a man’s profile picture may include a suit and tie (or at least, a dress shirt and tie), but it may be perfectly appropriate for a software developer at a startup to be pictured in a T-shirt and jeans. In most any business, it would be inappropriate to post photos of yourself half-drunk or half-naked. (Does that even need to be stated?) Employees shouldn’t use their corporate network as a platform for their personal partisan political beliefs (disconnected from the company’s interests in regulation or policy). Of course, it’s always possible to think of exceptions (such as the lad mag publisher who celebrates immaturity or the activist at a partisan political consulting firm). The point is that you need to make yourself look professional according to the standards of your industry.
The things to avoid ought to be obvious, but you can boost your professional profile within the company by doing a few other things right.
Fleshing out your profile
Along with your account on the collaboration network, your profile may have been prepopulated with some basic data: your name, title, e-mail address, phone number, and place in the org chart according to corporate personnel records. The picture from your employee security badge may be your default profile photo. Personnel systems may also provide some details about your level of educational attainment and any internal training courses you may have completed.
Or your profile may start as a blank slate, with only your name filled in. You want your profile to be more than the bare minimum details, though. Just as you want to be able to find people within the company who have specific experience and expertise, you want to make yourself easy to be found by others when you have something to offer them. If you can then tag your profile, in addition to offering a narrative description of your background, others can then find your profile through the same taxonomy they would use to locate other kinds of content.
Figure 5-2 shows a well-rounded, employee social profile, with a good photo, full contact info, a brief bio, and a list of keywords for topics of expertise.
And your photo should be good enough that those who connect with you online will also recognize you if they pass you in the hallway.
Figure 5-2: A good employee profile shows personality, areas of expertise, and contact info.
Answering questions
If you want to establish yourself as an expert or authority on any topic, pay attention to relevant questions and provide knowledgeable answers. In addition to making a good impression on whoever posted the question, your answers help build your reputation as a go-to person for questions on that topic. Anyone who searches on that topic will see the trail you’ve left.
One nice feature of the NewsGator platform that assists in this process is automated matching of tags associated with questions and tags associated with profiles. If you include a tag on your profile, you will automatically be notified when someone asks a relevant question, making it easy for you to jump in with the answer.
Other platforms support keyword-based or tag-based filtering of social feeds, which can be another way of identifying questions on a topic where you often have the answers.
Sharing useful information
Just as on public social networks, you don’t necessarily have to generate a ton of original content to be a valuable member of the community. Often, some of the people who add the most value are those who share interesting news articles, opinion columns, or videos, adding a few sentences of their own commentary. If the articles are relevant to your business, the market it operates in, or the professional development needs of your colleagues, they will thank you for sharing. If the analysis you offer, however pithy, seems accurate, you will get credit for your understanding. This can also be the jumping-off point for a broader discussion of business strategy or market strategies.
Share what you find interesting and useful. Be sure to include a note or a question making clear why it is relevant to your business. Those who have chosen to follow your posts will probably agree. At a minimum, they will find out more about what interests you and will share more relevant content with you.
Joining the right groups
Your network includes groups of people as well as individuals. Terminology varies (groups, communities, spaces, workspaces, projects), but often the subcommunities are more useful for many purposes than the company-wide community.
Membership in some groups may be automatic or required based on your participation in a project or your job role. Others are optional, topical groups. For example, my company has a group where website editors, production, and IT people share tips on the use of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media to connect with readers. Other groups are dedicated to sales strategy, time management, and “Exercisers in Need of Motivation” (a self-help group for employees).
Groups provide an opportunity to connect with people with similar interests or expertise, as well as teams focused on specific projects, functions, or initiatives. In addition to interacting through the group, you may decide to connect with some of its members individually, and they may seek to connect with you.
You find groups by searching for them or by paying attention to the group memberships of your best contacts.
If you search for an interest group that ought to exist but doesn’t, consider starting one. Depending on the rules laid down by community managers and IT administrators, you may need advance permission to start a group. Even if you don’t, ask for advice on how to go about it. For one thing, you want to confirm that there’s not an existing group that does what you have in mind — or, if there is a similar one, that you can articulate the distinct need your proposed group will fill. The uncontrolled proliferation of groups can create chaos in social collaboration networks, so you don’t want to add to it unnecessarily.
Assuming you can make a good case for a new group, positioning yourself as its founder and owner can be a good way of raising your professional visibility within the company — and, ideally, contributing to its success.
Having fun while showing respect for the workplace
Even at work, social networking ought to be fun. Just how much fun it should be, though, is a subject of some debate.
Some businesses in more traditional or conservative industries will field an enterprise social network only on the understanding that all conversation on the network should be work-related. Period. Posting a joke or a link to a review of the movie you saw over the weekend probably wouldn’t get you fired, but it would be frowned upon. Other organizations allow the occasional, casual post that is purely social on the main company feed or as an off-topic post within a workgroup. Typically, these are the same firms that allow the formation of non–work-related groups on the network on the theory that they give employees experience using the social software, while also building personal connections between employees that pay off by creating a more cohesive organization and supporting stronger teams.
I lean toward the more permissive philosophy, which many organizations have applied successfully to build more vibrant communities while still focusing the overall effort on getting work done. This is an issue for community managers, discussed in Chapter 13.
However, if you’re trying to work within the rules rather than being in a position to make them, you should not only read the official policy but also “take the temperature” of the environment and pay attention to what others can and cannot get away with in practice.
Show respect for the norms of your workplace, whether you agree with them or not, but try to be engaging within that framework.
Here are some guidelines that should apply to most organizations:
Show enthusiasm for work activities. In all cases, showing enthusiasm for your work is a good thing, as is giving praise to subordinates or peers who do a good job.
Take a natural, casual approach. Behave like a human, not like a machine that cranks out links to sales reports. Humanizing the workplace can be a pleasure all on its own. Many of us who have been trained by the public social networks find discovering new connections and having other people discover us to be a fun thing, so even in the most straight-laced organizations, you’ve got that.
Use good judgment. Posting pictures of your team having fun at work or celebrating their achievements at an after-work party is probably a good thing, if the photos are in good taste. Follow cues from co-workers and leaders in deciding what counts as good taste in your organization.
Look for opportunities to show you have a sense of humor. As I mention earlier, some collaboration networks will frown on posting jokes. For the most part, that’s not even what I’m talking about. Often, what you really want to do is slip a bit of observational humor into the end of a post or a comment on someone else’s content.