Throw the Business Cards Away (aka, How Strong is Your Network?)

Have you ever wandered around a conference and collected business cards? What do you do with them once you get them? Do you have a pile of business cards in your desk, perhaps with a rubber band around them?

Are these trophies, or what?

When I was designing JibberJobber I realized there were different ways to measure your network. I heard people brag about how many connections they had in LinkedIn:  "I have 3,550 connections in LinkedIn – if you connect with me you’ll have over five million people in your network!"

I also heard an interesting gem from career professionals:  "You get your job leads from third and fourth degree connections, not first and second degree connections."

As I started understanding networking better, a la Keith Ferrazzi, who refers to building “intimate relationships,” I realized there were different ways to measure a network. I can think of three key dimensions:

Breadth – how wide is your network, or, how many first degree connections to you have? These are the people who you’ve met on your own, not who you’ve been introduced to.

Depth – how deep is your network? These are all the people you’ve met through your first degree connections, so they would be your second, third, fourth, etc. connections.

Strength of Relationship – I don’t care if you have 20 or 2,000 people in your network if none of them know who you are, or will give you the time of day. In JibberJobber we allow you to track the strength of the relationship with each contact on a 0 – 5 star system. Ferrazzi suggests an A, B, C ranking system.

If you think about your networking efforts, what have the produced, with regard to these three dimensions? How wide and deep is your network? How strong are the relationships you have with each contact?

The next time you get business card, or a contact, think about where they fit into your network. Of course you need to give, share, and nurture. But understanding what your network is really made up of is critical, helping you know if you should be working on increasing the breadth, depth or strength of relationships.

Jason Alba is the author of "I'm on LinkedIn -- Now What??", which is his publisher’s fastest selling book. He co-authored I’m on Facebook – Now What??? and is CEO of JibberJobber.com. Jason interacts with thousands of career-minded professionals and hundreds of career management experts, and is passionate about helping people pay more attention to their personal career management. After losing his job and starting a fruitless job search, he realized there is a lot more to job security than having a resume packed with credentials. You can learn more about Jason at his blog.

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