New Rules of Networking
How does an ordinary bloke in the U.K. end up getting name-checked on stage at a TED conference by Tim Berners-Lee? How does a lady from a start-up company in County Derry, Northern Ireland find herself meeting a U.S. President? And how does her business partner discover a meeting with the Prime Minister is in his calendar shortly afterwards?
The new rules of networking have resulted in a new and clever blend of offline and online approaches. Your actions in one sphere can have startling and sometimes unpredictable consequences in the other.
The Curious Incident of the Blog
Half a million people have watched the grand-daddy of the web Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk, in which he asked government to open up their data in an effort to create the next web. One of the people Berners-Lee pointed to was Paul Clarke.
In the grand scheme of things, Clarke is a pretty normal person. In the process of going about his daily business in his (then) role at Directgov, the official government website for U.K. citizens, he blogged about a new dataset release relating to bicycle incidents. Within a few days, developers had mapped the data and it blipped on the radar of a major U.K. newspaper. As a result, almost one year to the day later, Tim Berners-Lee stood on stage and name-checked a civil servant he’d never met as one of the people in the U.K. who were making the power of information a reality.
To say Clarke was shocked would be an understatement. “I fell off my chair,” he told me.
Taking the Networks with You
The curious incident of the blog was just the start, however. Clarke decided to set up his own business in the middle of the credit crunch, a move he could not have made so successfully without good networking. Thanks to savvy use of social media to bring his photographic skills to the attention of the ex-colleagues he had acquired as followers on Twitter, word spread.
As a result, Clarke is now regularly invited to attend a wide array of government events, unconferences, and developer camps. He made a tangible success of his new business by using his connections and the reputation he is accruing, because he understands perfectly that reputation is incredibly important. How you conduct yourself online reflects in the opportunities you are given offline.
Local Companies, Global Reach
But it’s not just individuals using that unique blend of tech and face-to-face collaboration and discussion to their advantage. Mary McKenna and Paul McElvaney are business partners and co-founders of Learning Pool, a U.K. public sector (government, health bodies, fire, and police) e-learning company. Launched in 2006, and despite intense economic pressure due to unprecedented public sector cuts, the company continues to increase growth year on year.
McKenna attributes some of this success to their company’s recognition of the importance of digital networking. “Online networking is an important part of finding people and information these days. If our team and company didn’t do it, we would be neglecting part of our market and audience.”
This attitude is not restricted to service delivery to customers, either. Employees are specifically chosen for their networks and related skills. The company currently employs a few official “connectors,” people who were deliberately headhunted; the networks the employees brought with them were relevant to the future direction of Learning Pool’s business.
It is an interesting and evolving approach to digital networking. If your business needs to enter the digital space and you are not already well positioned to garner business, simply employ someone who is and piggyback on top of his network.
Hugs from the First Lady
Of course, you don’t get to meet the President just because your digital presence is massively disproportionate to the size of your company (Learning Pool currently employs just 40 staff). Real world networking comes into play as well.
McKenna is Chairman of the Northern Ireland Digital Circle and Non-Executive Director of her local theatre among many other things (she is a frequent and comfortable attendee at UK government unconferences). She suspects that these, too, contributed to her selection by the Northern Ireland regional development agency and the US Consulate. The digital noise she generates probably helped, but whatever the combination, it was the winning one. McKenna was selected to be part of the Irish Delegation for St Patrick’s Day 2011 and ended the day with a hug from the First Lady – something McKenna says she will remember for the rest of her life (and she blogged about shortly afterwards).
The crossovers don’t stop there. McKenna’s business partner McElvaney met the Prime Minister in July, as a result of a competition the Cabinet Office ran called Innovation Launchpad. As a public sector organisation, Learning Pool has a lot of contacts in that area, so when the call went out to ask their customers and friends in the civil service to vote for them, many willingly did. And thus the competition was won and the Prime Minister was met.
Neither meeting the President nor the Prime Minister may be said to have had a direct outcome on profits, growth, or investment. But it is inarguable that they have had an impact on reputation. As McKenna herself points out, “You can learn a lot from other people but in order to learn from them you need to know about them. Making good use of online networks allows you to know a wider circle of people as it’s not possible to be everywhere and meet people face to face all the time.” Whenever she travels, McKenna tries to meet people she knows online in real life, as meeting face to face cements relationships. “So yes, you have to do both and you have to work hard at building your network as a conscious activity,” she says.
McKenna gained her ferocious networking skills from two influences: her beginnings in business as an accountant, and Malcolm Gladwell. Whichever way you look at McKenna and her business partner’s stories, it is clear to see that digital and offline networking complement each other.
Stepping into the New Networking Game
So where do you start? What’s the magic ingredient which transforms your business practice?
Aside from reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, the simple answer is: Talk to people. There are a number of online networks waiting for you to join. Professional business breakfasts in your area meet monthly face to face but continue the conversations online, for instance.
And there are plenty of places for digital connections. LinkedIn is one of the world’s biggest online-only professional networking tools which mimics the circumstances of offline networking at conferences, by requiring introductions and encouraging you to recommend and endorse people if you enjoyed dealing with them. Twitter is a more informal place for professionals to chatter and discuss and sometimes argue; it moves faster but it has global reach and can keep you informed of your competitors’ movements way in advance of your favourite trade journals.
Being Human
Most of all, however, the best place to start is by asking people if they are on LinkedIn or Twitter when they hand you their business cards, and start the conversation offline. Ensure you always follow up the conversation online afterwards; it’s a useful reminder to the person you spoke to if you include where you met them: “Wonderful to meet you at the US chilled foods convention this afternoon, wonderful buffet.”
The conversation doesn’t always have to be business related either. Chatting about your favourite baseball team can put people at ease as quickly and easily online as offline, and that shared interest can lead to more serious conversations. At the very least you’ll be ahead of the game when compared to those who’ve not established contact at all.
Sometimes business deals are eased along by you and a customer sharing a similar taste in books, wine, or baseball teams. What works in person around the conference room table applies, too, in the digital world. If you talk about the things that interest you, they can provide the in’s that others are looking for to start a conversation with you.
And as Clarke, McKenna, and McElvaney and hundreds of thousands of others are finding out – that conversation could very well be life-changing.
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