The ENTiPping Point

As bright as we all proclaim ourselves to be, we are woefully inadequate at helping ourselves and each other manage personal relationships.

I don't mean to imply that we don't know how to interact socially, either online or offline.  But I think there is a great opportunity for us to crowdsource our relationships together. 

I wrote about the idea of "metafolksonomy" a few months back.  It was the notion that if you crowdsourced Delicious-like tagging of people in the social space, that you could define an aggregate social profile of that person.

Businesses have embraced the idea of customer relationship managment (CRM) for years.  Converse with Jeremiah Owyang and he'll tell you that the concept of "social" CRM is going to be key as we move the concept of CRM forward with added social profile management components.

But what about those people who aren't in the social space that are part of my network?  How do I keep track of them, categorize their relationship to me and, even more beneficially, make my relationship to them useful to you?

I Need A Tool

There are some interesting tools out there to help you manage personal relationship and contacts for sure.  Tools like Gist and Rapportive help you manage your social network contacts and intergrate the management of those into your Gmail, Outlook or even Salesforce.com environments.

Several weeks back, I came across an interesting product called Jigsaw that integrates into the Salesforce.com CRM.  It's a jointly-maintained database of business contacts at companies all over the world; think of it as a "Wikipedia for business contacts".  So if I have a phone number for an executive at a company that I feel is more "up to date" than his profile that someone else has entered in Jigsaw for him, I can update the information to the most current data, and everyone who has that person as a contact will now have the new information.

So why does this have to be for business only?

If I have a contact in my network (think "personal" and not "social" for a moment), wouldn't it be great if I made the context of my relationship to that person available to everyone so that my connectivity to that person could be utilized by others?

This is the intent of LinkedIn from a business perspective.  But not everyone's on LinkedIn and the relationships I'm referring to may not suit LinkedIn.  Let me give you an example... 

"I had no idea..."

Let's say you have really been trying to made inroads in Company X.  You and I are friends because we were on a board together for a local charity.  You've tried and tried to get a consulting gig with Company X, but it'd be great if you knew someone there.  You check your LinkedIn profile and have no contact there.  Wouldn't it be good if you knew that my wife was a 3rd generation descendent of the man that founded Company X?  My wife's not on LinkedIn -- she's just someone you know because of me.  How many times have you found out this kind of information and thought, "I had no idea..."?

Now you know about that relationship -- how do you make this newly-discovered fact available for others that may know me?  This isn't something that Outlook's "contacts" area is going to help manage.  And even if I can manage my own relationships that way, it's certainly not going to benefit anyone else.  These "relationship affinity traits" somehow need to be captured and shared if we're all truly going to benefit from our personal networks.  If a Jigsaw-type repository for personal contacts and the relationships these contacts were involved in were available publicly, we could all benefit;  we might truly be but "six degrees of separation" away from anyone. 

Remember: Social Doesn't Mean "Online"

The world isn't completely "socially networked" yet.  Get involved in your local community and you will realize that the knowing how people interconnect and knowing how to leverage those connections is key to becoming integrated in making things happen.  But it's also important to remember that who you know offline can be just as important to those relationships that are primarily online.  We should find a way to combine the two so that all can find value in those interactions that we nurture.

So, what tools do you use to manage your personal relationships and network offline?

I posed a question a while back on Twitter about whether or not business-applicable social media networks like Twitter and LinkedIn rely on some of us not being on the network for it to have value. This brought me to a few bigger questions about what the true meaning of "value" is and how it might apply to the business world and interconnections on social media networks.

If you look up the word "value", most dictionaries include a definition that describes "relative worth" of an item. This implies that value of something is dependent on its relationship to something else not having value. The value of money lies in the availability of one portion of it relative to the entire amount possible. As people get more wealthy, the value that $1 holds is nowhere near the value that that a person at the poverty level might have for that same $1.

So I pose my question to you in blog form this time:

If we all become connected and are able to leverage each other in an equally accessible manner, do we all lose the overall value of being connected?

If my company can get things done just as quickly as yours because we all know the same people and we are all leveraging the same network, is it really possible to claim that the network has provided either one of us "value"?

Now, this doesn't necessarily apply to social networks used in the personal space. I can find great value in being connected with my friends and family and the "relative" part of "relative value" is compared to that of missing out on family photos, friendships, etc. The value here is not dependent on me being more connected than some other entity (i.e. a business), but rather the opportunity cost of not being connected.

What do you think? If we get to a saturation point and everyone is leveraging connections equally on social networks, would they still have business value?