mikelally.net

Great article from McKinsey Quarterly “When Job Seekers Invade Facebook”. (You will have to register). With the apocalypse upon us, we are seeing a huge rush to “network” via the social networking tools of the day.

I love this quote from the article:

“There are, of course, powerful economic reasons behind the trend. As sociologist Nan Lin puts it in his book, Social Capital,

“Individuals engage in interactions and networking in order to produce
profits.” These profits are based upon information, influence, social
credentials, and recognition. The accumulated social capital,
meanwhile, helps individuals to gain competitive advantages in the
labor market as a result of privileged access to “resources” located on
the social networks.“

Of course, you are not going to increase your capital simply by joining. These are tools. They exist to help you communicate and find linkages where you didn’t know they existed. You still have to do the legwork.

The challenge is developing your social capital without seeming greedy. Right? At the end of the day, I want to LEVERAGE my network. I wanted to do this with my network before anyone ever heard of LinkedIn. Hell…even before anyone ever heard of Al Gore’s internets.

In order to leverage you have to embrace the old addage, by a giver not a receiver. Give first. And people will want to give back.