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- “Whenever business people get together and talk about networking and how it might improve their business, one of the more emotive topics will always be quality versus quantity. The quality brigade will insist that it is important to know who it is you’re talking before making a connection. They are looking for the right match to their requirements.
- Preventing Flame Wars: Two Basic Principles of Netiquette by Scott Allen on the Virtual Handshake Blog
“lately, including my own Virtual Handshake Network on Ryze. I expect this on, say, Slashdot or other topical networks where people are anonymous, but it really surprises me that people engage in this in a business networking context. No one looks their best when they’re bickering.
There are two simple principles of netiquette that you can use to help prevent escalation of these conversations into flame wars:
1. Presume Good Intent
2. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person“
To those who know me, it will come as no surprise that I prefer making random connections and that I have no limits on the number of connections I’m prepared to make. In my working lifetime, I have met with 23,000 people and connected online with thousands more. Not all of those people have become close friends or even regular acquaintances but enough have for me to believe that quality can emerge from quantity.
“Technology can help you maintain a high touch relationships with a large number of people. But just how large should that number be?” ask Scott Allen and David Teten in a Fast Company article in January this year. Their conclusion is that “the number of your relationships and the average strength of your relationships end up being inversely proportional. The more people you know, the less well you know them. If you want to build stronger relationships, you’re going to have to do so with a smaller number of people. You can spend all of your time with your close friends and family (strong ties, low number), or spread yourself across a wide number of people (weak ties, high number). However maintaining both high strength and high number is physically impossible”.
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