About a month ago I attended a conference down in Brighton, where there was a rather odd mix of people from across the industry, which had the effect of creating a very different and engaging event.
I met this one guy helped companies engage through social media. Within days of returning to London the pereson in question had blogged something about the event, pinged me a note asking me to comment and then asked to link on Linkedin, the network dream.
Weeks later I found myself on a project where I thought it could be a great opportunity for this company in question to come on board and emailed my new networked pal.(I didn't mention that there was some potential work, merely suggested meeting to find out a bit more about how they worked) ... nothing ... I tried again ... suggesting we perhaps have a quick chat on the phone ... am still waiting.
What happened? Volume vs depth of relationship I was thinking. Perhaps this guy had connected with the other 120 delegates, perhaps it was just a case of collecting stickers for the book. Checking on his linked in contacts, I realised he was in the 500+ realm.
I think we have all fallen foul of getting over excited on the network front and over connecting - but how many people can we realistically have a relationship with? Social? Business? At what point does the network we have created and a contact list become the phone book?
A bit of digging turned up this concept of the dunbar number from anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who stated that 150 people was the limit to the size of network of people with whom we can have stable relationships with.
Cameron Marlow, the in-house sociologist at Facebook also showed that the average number of friends was around 120 but that the number of meaningful relatiosnhips was around 7-10 of those. Outside of the 120-150 you're just white noise - a picture in the loft.
This point was made even clearer by David Wong's brilliant Inside The Monkeysphere (worth reading if only for the very funny lift example).
I looked at my other contacts in the 500+ club and on a broad and unscientific basis they all seemed to be either people I didn't know that well or the "God I'm busy" types - and I'm sure this is the face of the natural collector (please let me know how your 500+ linkedin friends look like).
So where does this leave me? Realising I was probably not inside this chap's monkey sphere? Thinking who would be in my 150? Should I get to 500? (could I get to 500 ?!!) Being reminded very accutely about good business behaviour being the ability to allocate finite resource ... and probably a mental note to self, "Beware of men bearing links"
