Remember the High School graduation speech your principle gave about staying in touch with your peers. Majority of successful people today had some way gone to school together in the past like Lady GaGa who went to the same high school – Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York – as the Hilton sisters.
If you weren’t blessed with famous peers or considered yourself more of a loner, there is still hope! The other day I overheard a conversation about how a novice DJ managed to distribute his mixtapes thru Twitter. It started with finding all the DJ twitter accounts that had similar musical taste and following them. Then following all the people that followed that DJ who to his surprise was not Industry people but Groupies. The Groupies followed the novice DJ back which snow balled in more people following him because if the Groupies was following famous DJ “X” then this (novice) DJ should also be followed…get it?
Its all a game of networking. Originally limited to attending conferences and seminars within your field as well as attending local Chamber of Commerce meetings but now, online social networking is taking it to a whole other level. Networking face-to-face was “Schmoozing” or “rubbing elbows”, all expressions used among business professionals for introducing and meeting one another, and establishing rapport. Now with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networking has turned into Following, Retweeting and Subscribing, and it seems to be working.
LinkedIn is leading the Social Media networking game by specifically aiming to connect for business purposes only. So much that NYC High School graduates are given course on how to utilize LinkedIn to find people working at companies that they would want to work at. It also works the other way around. Human Resource people use LinkedIn when hiring to see the referrals and network (or networth) a potential candidate has.
Now if you really want to be pulled back into High School times, then Klout will take you there. Klout is a new social “networth” of sorts where it gives you a Score that measures the influence you have based on your social media activity. You would think this as a silly popularity contest like High School and it would not take off. But they manage to connect your Klout score to Klout Perks, exclusive products or experiences that you earn based on your influence. Influencers have earned sweet perks like laptops and airline tickets. Not only does this give great incentives to the individual to “win” something but also companies want to promote directly to people that have a high level of influence.
If all this social media talk makes you want to go hide in you High School locker, I don’t blame you. But the true difference between “rubbing elbows” 1980’s style and “following” 2010 stye is that the playing field is a bit more even then before. You had to be born into or know someone in the “circle” that you wanted to be in. Today you just have to google their name…