SOCIAL CAPITAL AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
As collaboration is an absolutely key skill it makes sense to treat it with the appropriate respect. It is about how people can connect to you, find you on different platforms and get information about you. More than 60% of all jobs are found through networking, and word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools ever.
Remember that the first thing people will do is to Google you. Then they will go to social network sites to get more information about you. As I mentioned before, this new connectivity links everyone with everyone. It is the basic idea behind all social network sites. According to the ‘six degrees of separation’ principle, each person is separated from another person by fewer than six degrees. The idea grew out of a study about social connections called ‘small world experiment’ in 1967 by Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram. He asked 160 students to post chain letters and trace their journey to a particular target person not personally known to them. He found out that the average number of 5.5 connections (intermediate acquaintance links) were needed to connect them. In 2003 Duncan J. Watson, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, repeated Milgram’s experiment by using a website asking 61,000 people to send messages to 18 targets worldwide. He confirmed Milgram’s result. We live in a small world, where everyone can be linked to everyone else. But obviously we don’t only want to know how closely we are connected — we also want to know what kinds of communities and friendships we are creating.
One very important point here: the quality of your social capital is more important than quantity, and by quality I mean how much you like to deal with people.
If you focus on quality instead of the number of people in your network, you are more likely to reach good results while having fun along the way. And please, only hand out personal information when requested, not on every single occasion that social networking sites offers you. The more you respect your private sphere, the more you respect yourself.
Social networks offer a great opportunity to find like-minded people. They give you the possibility to find out more about specific themes that interest you, who else is working on them, and who could be interesting to work with. You also find information about events and festivals, awards, schools and institutions. Another great way to get into contact with people with similar thinking to you is through public relations specialists. Besides internet PR (public relations) you can also use those trained in marketing-communication discipline. There are many different special-interest magazines, which could be interesting for you to reach a specific target and which maybe are interested in interviewing you as an expert. PR specialists can help you to find these magazines and are well versed in connecting and developing content jointly with you for them.
