The Case For Quality

Those that believe in the quality approach believe that you will usually get more from less; that a smaller, highly committed group is more valuable to you than vast numbers of connections whose interest in you is transient and distant. Characteristics of a quality network include members that typically know each other, connect on multiple levels and have networks or social graphs that overlap with each other. These people are far more likely to share an emotional connection with you and therefore will be highly motivated to help, often offering support without expectation of reward. In many respects, this is a retread of friends vs acquaintances cliche, or going even further back, an echo of the proverbial ‘blood being thicker than water‘.

The mechanics of this breaks down like this….

…a focus on developing a few contacts really well; indepth knowledge of a few, rather than cursory knowledge of many.

…you give before you get. In fact, you give without the expectation of getting, because that’s how reciprocal gift exchange works. This is networking as Marcel Mauss would understand it.

…the favours you do ask for are small, do-able and infrequent. It’s a reference here, an introduction there. Whatever you ask for must not impinge on that person’s day or feature in as an insert into their daily ‘to-do’ list.

What this means for you as a networker?
Your network is typically small to medium sized – you have 150-200 connections on LinkedIn, a similar number on Facebook and signed up for Twitter only abandon it when you realised it was all about random followers. When you networking In Real Life, you typically do so with people you already know and have worked with before. The leads you receive do turn into opportunities, but also tends to be the type of work you’ve done before. You rarely get approach by new people, or by people offering something new.

The Case For Quantity
This argument suggests that you cannot depend on anyone in your network doing anything for you – no matter how much they love you. Its a busy world out there and your ability to mobilise your close connections is constrained by priorities you can’t control. Furthermore, you believe that exhortations for help can produce the opposite effect, annoying your audience and further reducing their motivation to help. Far better to have a larger network, where the chances of selfish interest aligning are improved by simply increasing the scale. In many respects, this is a retread of the ‘selfish gene’ argument, where the ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude is pervasive and the sooner we understand this, the better able we will be to network more effectively.

The mechanics of this breaks down like this….

…get as big an audience for your message as you can because you can’t presume to know who is going to be in the best position to help you – you might as well build the numbers.

…you provide a consistent message, reducing the variety of your communication so that your audience is clear about what you do and what you can offer. You accept the risk that you will lose people through your monotony, but you exchange that for a belief that your consistency will bring its return when someone eventually gets the message

…you don’t ask for favours at any time, because your marketing efforts should be enough to induce opportunities through inbound enquiries.

What this means for you as a networker?
You have an enormous network of contacts; you’re well over 500+ connections on LinkedIn, most of whom you would not recognise if you met them in real life. You network at conferences, events, bars, whereever there is an opportunity – in fact, you are one of those guys who is never without your business card, or shy about handing it out to someone you’ve only just met. You create many different types of business opportunity, and whilst you embrace the chance of working with people you know, more often than not, you are pitching and working on projects with new people for the first time, all of the time.

So whats better, what works?
It is difficult to know which is the best approach when there are many successful examples of both practices – perhaps best exemplified by two internet celebrities whose business success can be clearly traced to different approaches to networking. Compare Seth Godin’s tightly knit network of highly committed followers, with Guy Kawasaki’s legions of casuals. Both men would be considered to be amongst the foremost thought leaders in the field of social networking – for real and on line – and yet their networking philosophy and behaviour would appear to be very different from each other.

Perhaps the way out is to take warning that this debate is almost always framed in zero sum terms – its Quality or Quantity, its Right or Wrong – and challenge the thinking as to whether it is matter of choosing one over the other.

In networking, it might be more useful to think of quality vs quantity debate as strategic postures that you adopt as your circumstances dictate, rather than polar opposites from which you must choose.

The historical development of a personal network is almost always missing from the debate and my guess would be that most people engage quality or quantity networking at some point in their career, depending on circumstance. For a Job Seeker, its important that more people know you are looking for work, and therefore logical that you make the push to towards increasing the your range by building the numbers. When you are off market and less inclined to spend time fielding inbound enquiries, then perhaps you become more discerning with whom and with how many you connect with.

Successful networkers oscillate between the two paradigms – from quality to quantity and back again – switching tactics to suit circumstance and switching back again when those circumstances change.