One of the things I’ve always had sitting at the back of my mind is the importance of making contacts, and getting to know new people. Back in my university days, I did some research into social network analysis, which involved super-geeky terms like radiality and centrality and structural equivalence. Now all these concepts had complicated formulas but they just could not compare to how complex the real-life scenarios I was trying to model were. For example, radiality describes how much influence and reach a node has within a network. In real life, this is equivalent to: how popular are you in your social circle, and how influential are you in your social circle, and of course, the hundreds of permutations and variables involved in calculating that. Centrality describes a number of things: how close your immediate friends are, how much influence you have with your immediate friends, how many people you know and so on and so forth…
Now to take all this knowledge and actually *apply* it to your (very real) life is something different altogether. It’s nice to talk about nodes and strong ties and weak ties and connectors and to doodle them on a page during Research Topic classes, but using the theory is something different.
Interestingly enough, I’ve only ever been recommended 2 books on the subject: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
I believe that the first (Never Eat Alone) is the standard “business networking success” text available out there, and covers all the usual stuff like how to systemise your contacts, how to keep in touch with people, and the importance of weak ties over strong ties (quantity over quality). Blink is more second-degree knowledge, in that you have to think a bit before you can apply it. It describes the process where people “thinslice” everything in their sensory perception, in order to make sense of it and file it away in their mind. Applied to the subject of people, thinslicing is all about first impressions, and about accumulating multiple thinslices to the point where you go from “some random person” to “hey, it’s that guy Aaron”.
These concepts are better, but they are still largely theoretical. Here’s how I’m putting them into practice:
I recently came across a great service called Highrise HQ, created by the same guys behind Basecamp. I think they call it “CRM that works” or something catchy like that… I like to think of it as personal CRM. It lets you input contacts, keep important dates like when you first met, when their birthdays are, and add additional information that is stored in a journal format. And this is what is key. If you use it properly, Highrise gives you the ability to record every conversation and email you have with a contact, in a great amount of detail.
As to thinslicing, it’s pretty simple: go to the same places and events a lot. If you are a “going out” kinda person, then you can frequent your fine choice of drinking establishment multiple times, and simply by being there often… you’ll get to know the other regulars and the barstaff. I use this principle for business networking events. If you attend a lot of networking events, meetups, mastermind groups and talks, then you will inevitably see a lot of the same people. On the first time you may shake hands and exchange a couple of words. On the second, you may say hi in passing. On the third you’re exchanging business cards. On the fourth you find yourself shooting the breeze over a glass of scotch at 2am after all the other attendees have gone off to sleep.
With just these two ideas, you are already ahead of 99.99% of everyone out there when it comes to who you know. Over time, it is likely that I will refine the use of these tools and concepts… but until then, I’m just going to have fun meeting new people 
- Aaron P
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
didn’t read it at but I’m sure it’s clever.
You’re too clever for me aaron
WTF is that picture? Thats not me