What Color is Your Network?

“Networking” is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around so much that, even if folks don’t really understand what you’re talking about, they always nod knowingly. It’s the social equivalent of “good cholesterol, bad cholesterol.”
I spend a lot of time extolling the benefits of plugging into networks. People seem to get it, because they keep showing up at the meetings. Yet, by understanding the inter-connectedness between familiar concepts and vague notions of “networking”, they could achieve greater network growth.
I believe this is how we learn; the comfort of familiarity relaxes our minds enough to allow us to peer into the complex fog of a new idea.

The vague notion for today is that the color of your network is an indicator of the extent of your reach.

Six Degrees of Separation
A short story, theoretical math, a magazine, a play (and a movie), a game, a social experiment [1]
Familiar territory: you know about the movie. You may have heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the game that was inspired by it. But, how much do you know of the history behind this concept?

  1. A short story, Chains, by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, introduces the theory that each of us is connected through no more than four acquaintances. (1929)
  2. Mathematicians Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) attempt to prove this theory. (1950s)
  3. A psychologist, Stanley Milgram, takes a crack at it, using the postal service as the network. His results were published in Psychology Today. (1967)
  4. A playwright, John Guare, pens Six Degrees of Separation, which is about a con man who claimed to be the son of actor Sidney Portier. Later, it is made into a film. (1993)
  5. The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia is created by Brett C. Tjaden. It is a computer game that connects Kevin Bacon to any other actor or actress by linking the movies in which they’ve appeared together with other actors. (1996) [2]
  6. Duncan Watts, a Columbia University professor, uses email messages to test the theory of connectedness. He discovers that the number of links is indeed six. (2001)

Here’s My Card
bar, restaurant, Chamber, affiliations, hotel conventions, world stage
In the beginning, there was the business card. It wound up in various circular files: Rolodexes and trashcans. Eventually, we figured out that it made more sense to give them to those people who knew somebody who needed our service or product. Thus, the networking party was born. From the local restaurant meeting to the international arena, pressing the flesh and making new contacts is a powerful way to extend your network:

  1. Happy Hour
  2. Structured Networking Meetings
  3. Chamber of Commerce
  4. Guilds, Associations and Societies
  5. National Conventions
  6. World Conferences

The Customer is Always Right
“I love Widgets!”, “Sally sells Widgets”, “I need more Widgets”, “Yes, I’ll buy the Super Widget!”, “I love Widgets, so will you!”, “As seen on TV”
Now we come to the other side of the equation. The recipients of your services or products. A happy customer is a repeat customer. A happy customer also talks about you to others. If you think of your customer base as a specialized network, you’ll see that it pays to build it as much as possible:

  1. unsolicited testimonials (Word of mouth marketing is free)
  2. referrals (Never make another cold call!)
  3. repeat business (Don’t neglect your network! [3])
  4. upsells (They already trust you, they’ll buy more!)
  5. solicited testimonials (See Virtual Buzz, below)
  6. celebrity endorsements (If Oprah likes it …)

Virtual Buzz
signatures, articles, e-Books, photos, podcasts, cobranding
The online complement to off-line word of mouth has many techniques that will expand your network.
Ron McDaniel writes about both off-line and online creative viral marketing in his Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing blog. [4]
The common viral methods are signatures with links to your website or other Internet asset. Less obvious vectors are free reprint articles, free e-Books, digital photographs, podcasts, screen-savers, demo disks, and cobranded software.
Each of these can be passed from person to person in the usual ways: email, RSS, ftp and old-fashioned disk swapping. There is another way to spread this stuff: online stores!
Ensure that your website address is included as a clickable link, a visible watermark or an audible message.
To pack even more punch, ask your customers for testimonials. Adding third-party validation to your marketing is very potent. If it doesn’t make sense to place the testimonials within the viral package, just put them on your website.

  1. Signatures in email, forums and blogs
  2. Article repositories such as EzineArticles.com
  3. Downloads: give away your e-Books and they will spread like influenza
  4. Photo hosting: put your photos on Frappr.com, worth1000.com and smugmug.com
  5. podcasts distributed via RSS - imagine!
  6. combine the power of cobranding with the ease of order fulfillment systems that you probably already use for paid content and you’ve got a recipe for a viral nuke!

The Long Tail
books, movies, music, odds and ends, AdWords, more music
There are some concepts that, if we take the time to familiarize ourselves with them, can really open our eyes to the reality of networks.
The Long Tail is based on the statistical analysis of popularity versus inventory. The graph of this analysis resembles a long tail. Chris Anderson coined the term in a 2004 Wired Magazine article. [5]
In a nutshell, The Long Tail shows that the cumulative power of many small networks may exceed the power of a single, large network. The total inventory of united niche markets threatens the physically constrained inventory of the established, mass-market providers. Examples include:

  1. Amazon.com more book selections than traditional chains
  2. NetFlix.com more movie choices than Blockbuster
  3. Rhapsody every track gets downloaded
  4. eBay.com Whatever it is, they have it.
  5. Google leveraging its technology to reach small niche advertisers by economically removing geographical constraints
  6. Ecast purveyor of barroom jukeboxes that are connected by broadband - obviously, more variety than a Wurlitzer!

Who Owns the Internet?
gbr6-p30.n54ny.ip.att.net, 0.so-7-0-0.XR1.DFW9.ALTER.NET, sl-bb20-atl-11-0.sprintlink.net, ewr-core-02.inet.qwest.net, cable, lva.lib.va.us
Begin with the end in mind. This was the inspiration for this whole post. My college network sent out a link to an interesting article, which mentions one of the network members, Bill Cheswick.
The synchronicity of it all is amazing, really. I am linked to Ben Worthen [6], the author of this article, by way of Bill Cheswick, who made the map for Ben!
The link is actually stronger: while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, I worked as a computer consultant. Bill Cheswick was employed by the same company as a systems operator. Bill taught advanced programming topics for the benefit of the consultants, which is how I got to know him personally.
We are still connected twenty years later, via the Internet.
So, who owns it? In North America, it belongs to:

  1. AT&T
  2. Verizon
  3. Sprint Nextel, Level 3 and other major backbone providers
  4. Qwest
  5. the cable industry
  6. everyone else
Six Degrees of References:
[1] Wikipedia Get all into it!
[2] Oracle of Bacon at Virginia You must try this!
[3] The Value of Customer Retention Quantifies the lifetime value of a customer
[4] Indie Virus Exemplifies this post. I keep up with Buzzoodle, shouldn’t you?
[5] The Long Tail What do people really want?
[6] Who Owns the Internet?, by Ben Worthen (courtesy of CIO.com)