HOW DOES QUANTITY BRING QUALITY?

At least for me…

Quantity brings quality part I: How does quantity bring quality to MY network?

Here is my experience where I discovered that quantity does bring quality to my network.

I started like a regular networker, having a LinkedIn profile and a bunch of contacts. Once, a year ago, users I did not know, invited me. And I accepted their invitations.

Then I began to connect with people I did not really know but with whom we had common interests. While I gradually increased the number of my connections I got more and more users contacting me for interessant new opportunities proposals. Regularly these people tell me that they contact me because of my number of connections, that enable them to have more visibility through my network and by extension more visibility through their network.

This is why I write that in my case quantity does bring quality.

Let’s now make some theory.

Quantity brings quality part II: Who are the LinkedIn users I invited?

Every LinkedIn user looks more for quality rather than quantity. Quantity is a clear concept for all LinkedIn users. It means a quantity of 1^st level connections. Quality is another matter, quality can mean different things for many people. It can be asked in two ways, quality or/and networking goals.

Some questions

What is quality for me?

Is quality, really knowing my connections so that I can discover new opportunities through a “trusted” chain of LinkedIn users?

–OR-

Is quality the ability to discover new opportunities even if I do not personnally know the people involved?

What are my networking goals?

Are they just to manage my network of people I personnally know?

-OR-

Are they to maximizing chances to find new opportunities by meeting people I have not personnally met?

From answers to these questions we can outline several user’s profile (see sacred cow dung web site from Chris Mayaud at http://www.sacredcowdung.com/archives/2006/01/highperformance.html for more details).

Let’s simplify this classification by writing that we have 2 kinds of LinkedIn users: “regular” networkers and “open” networkers.

Regular networkers only connect with people they personnally know while open networkers may accept connections with users they don’t personnally know.

We will now try to know what is the ratio between regular and open networkers in the LinkedIn network.

Some numbers

I have invited several thousands of people who were working in domains similar to mine but whom I did not personnally know. Inviting people you do not personnally know is strictly forbidden by LinkedIn and I stopped doing so 9 months ago. But I got some results to be analyzed from this random/blind invitations experience.

I can see from the ratio between users who accepted my invitation and those who did not accept that roughly 40% of LinkedIn users are open networkers.

If you are a “regular” networker stop reading this post here, but if you are on the 40% open networker side please go on!

I think we may find some common ground...

Quantity brings quality part III: Back to something concrete for open networkers

As you can imagine I am open to ALL connections from LinkedIn users who have the common goal of increasing our number of connections so YOU and I can bring quality to our networks.

Connect with me using the “Invite Eric to connect” link in the top right green window at the top of my LinkedIn profile that you can find at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariacher click "I know Eric" and put my email eric.mariacher@gmail.com

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