By Ford Harding and Mimi Spangler

Schmoozing is to networking what carbonation is to beer; you can do without it, but it’s bound to be flat if you do.  The definitions we have seen of the term are unsatisfactory.  It clearly is a way of conversing, though hardly casual, as one dictionary describes it, even if it may seem so.  It does have a purpose, though not solely to gain advantage, as another dictionary says, because often there is a give element, too.

We define it as low-key conversing on business and personal issues to give and gain advantage.  It is the conversational part of networking.  Done right, it is engaging, light, personal, caring, helpful and purposeful.  And it has undoubtedly been around since the dawn of commerce.  They schmoozed in the Hanseatic League, they schmoozed along the Silk Road, and they schmoozed before that in the prehistoric and early historic towns of the Fertile Crescent.

Schmoozing has had to adapt to technological change in the past. Today, much schmoozing is done by phone, though at some time in the past doing so must have seemed an oddity.  Tele-schmoozing became more frequent as the technology improved, phones became more common, and as telephone costs came down.

The rise of the internet has brought a new technological challenge to schmoozers.  To schmooze, you must converse, and conversing over what has in its early days been a largely asynchronous medium is hard.  And if you can’t schmooze over the internet, can you network over it?  Not effectively, we would argue.

The lack of easy synchronous communication still limits schmoozing on some social networking platforms, like LinkedIn, points out Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director and Social Media Lead at BlissPR.  But the ease of synchronous communications is developing rapidly.  Sosnow finds Twitter the preferred vehicle.  Starting from scratch eighteen months ago, she now has 4,500 followers on Twitter.  And she is generating leads from that source.

With advances in the technology, like Twitter and texting, that remove barriers to conversing, e-schmooze has arrived.  This is how it is done today:

• Information easily found on the internet serves as an enabler for e-schmooze.  Schmoozing is purposeful and it is easier to develop a purpose when you have greater access to information about your contacts.  For example, knowing in advance through Linked-In that Persons A, B and C are linked to Person D makes it easier and more efficient to have a conversation about D.
• Tweeting or texting contacts with bits of helpful news, congratulations and requests for information or advice provide starters for electronic conversations, just as they do when schmoozing face-to-face or by phone.  The advantage of the e-schmooze is the potential to start this conversation with many people at once, far more than can be done with the traditional schmooze, which requires calling contacts one at a time, or, at best, meeting with a small group.   This allows to e-schmoozer to out-network competitors.
• E-schmoozers then follow up with groups or individuals, depending on responses to a conversation-starter.
• As the e-schmoozer gets to know individual contacts through such exchanges, his conversations can become more personal and focused.
• E-schmoozing sometimes involves rapid exchanges that cover both personal and business issues.  These exchanges are more effective, if they sometimes meander between business and personal issues, just as voice conversations do, and if they involve humor and sincere interest in the other person.
• E-schmoozing works best if it is but a part of a wider range of communications, including voice and faces-to-face conversations.  Tweets and other electronic communications may first put you in touch with a contact and help you advance the relationship; the relationship will be stronger if you also eventually meet and talk by phone.

This is not rocket science, but are you doing it?  If not, the muscle the internet provides will allow others, more youthful and technologically sophisticated, to out-schmooze you.

This post completes an interview with Konstantinos Kasekas, whose 8,500 LinkedIn contacts qualify him as a super user.  The first part appeared last week.
 
Q:  Are there any tricks of the trade for using LinkedIn you would care to share?
 
Kasekas: If someone sees the merit of maintaining a larger, looser network, versus a smaller, trusted network, I would recommend they also loosen the criteria determining who they add to their network. Personally, before I ran out of invitations, I would invite everyone to join my group. My friends, colleagues, contacts, people I would interview, people I would have a passing conversation with – everyone. Please note that inviting people you don’t know is a violation of the LinkedIn user agreement, so you should stop short of that.

Q:  How do you invite people?

Kasekas:  Do not send out one of those “generic” boilerplate invitations, “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” because it depersonalizes an already impersonal medium. And when you get an invitation, whatever you decide to do, always try and respond to every personalized invitation with an email “thanks for sending me the invitation”. This helps differentiate you as a LinkedIn member who GETS it. And will help you stand out.

For a more thorough list check out my blog entry On LinkedIn Size Does Matter.

Q:  Is there a saturation point where the flow of information through LinkedIn becomes so heavy that it overwhelms?

Kasekas:  Oh, absolutely. I hit that point about two years ago, when I hit the 2,000 1st contacts mark. I have turned all my email notifications off. If I were to get an email notification for everything that occurred within my network I would have crashed my email server a long time ago. This is a key problem when you are a communication hub in such a large network; how do you differentiate meaningful communication from noise? It takes time, that’s all I can say. To be candid, it is more of an art than a science. There is at least one near miss, I can recall, when a potential client sent me an inmail, asking us to participate in a global RFP. It was a completely unsolicited contact and the message was almost lost in the hundreds of inmails that sit on my LinkedIn mailbox. The good news is that I did find it in time and was able to garner some valuable conversations from the message. Have other such messages fallen through the cracks? Probably, but it is the price I pay for being at the center of the network.

Long term, this has implications for all users.  It’s like banner ads.  At first they had a big impact, now people block them out as visual noise.   The discussions and news portions of groups are becoming irrelevant, except for questions in key groups; 

Q: What are coming advances we might expect as LinkedIn develops?

Kasekas: They are trying to integrate better communications like Twitter and notes function.    People have realized that LinkedIn has advantages, so active participation is going up.  Profiles are becoming more developed, so content is improving. 

I think there is a risk that it is becoming too much of everything for everybody.  That risks alienating users.  Then it might be leapfrogged.  Superusers find paid services less valuable.

(This is the first of a series of posts on interesting people I have encountered)

The value of LinkedIn is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up.  A few heavy users lead the way, discovering new ways to use it, and the rest of us straggle behind them.  Gary Pines, Harding & Company’s strongest advocate for using the network, suggested we interview one of these leaders to gain some insight into its future direction.

Konstantinos Kasekas, a recruiter for Hudson and an author of the blog, www.beyond.jobs, has been a heavy user for three years and has over 8,500 1st contacts (over 16 million total).  Always operating at high energy levels, he becomes so joyous talking about LinkedIn that it sweeps everyone within earshot along.  He kindly agreed to be interviewed:

Q:   You can’t possibly have relationships with 8,500 people.  Why collect so many contacts?

Kasekas:  Because it makes the key decision maker visible to me, making part of my job as a “Lead Generator”, significantly easier.  In the past, the identity of the decision maker was obscure, protected behind a veil of corporate privacy.  Now that paradigm has been obliterated. Due to the site’s depth and breadth, on LinkedIn I can conduct a specialized key word search and identify key decision makers immediately. For example, Lululemon Athletica  is a global clothing manufacturer, with a strict “No Names” policy. If you call into their HR department and ask to speak to a Recruiter, or Director of HR (key decision makers in our line of work), you will immediately be turned down by the Operator and be forwarded to a general mailbox where you can leave a message. However, a quick search in my linkedin network, gives me a short cut around this process. The importance of “Size” is critical here, since a linkedIn search is limited to my “network” of contacts, defined as “my immediate contacts, their contacts, and their contacts’ contacts. So Ford, if you conducted the same search at Lululemon, you would likely get different results than I, simply because my network is larger than yours. Simple economies of scale. The larger my network, the more I get to see.

Q:  Once you identify the person you want to meet, do you ask your mutual contact for an introduction?

Kasekas:  Usually not.   Usually I don’t know that person either, so I go directly after the person I want to meet.  There are a number of tactics to get to them but they don’t involve LinkedIn.

Q:  That’s it?  It’s just a big directory?

Kasekas:  No, but don’t underestimate the directory value.  Identifying key decision makers in a company, a process that used to take several phone calls or varying degrees of research, can now be done in mere seconds.

Q:  How else do you get value from LinkedIn that people with fewer contacts might not?

Kasekas:  Recently, I had the VP of Global Talent Management at a Fortune 500 company contact me from Paris, through LinkedIn even though she, herself, only had ten contacts on LinkedIn.  If my network was smaller, she wouldn’t have found me on the site, and more importantly wouldn’t have found me as attractive. A well connected professional with a large “rolodex” is generally viewed as a key strength in consulting.  This could lead to global relationship.

Increased visibility both ways is what it’s all about.  That’s all that counts.  It’s very difficult to gain trust on the internet, so why bother? Go for maximize visibility and work on trust through other means.

Q:   So, how does one get 8,500 contacts?

Kasekas:  I am a “super-user”. This does not mean I am super, but that I have more than 5,000 1st contacts.  This group of users represents the top 98th percentile of LinkedIn members. Unlike other members, super-users focus on one thing; growing our networks indefinitely.  It is more a mindset than anything else, as all my resources are either dedicated to using LinkedIn, or how to use LinkedIn to enhance my professional goals. There are email addicts, and blackberry addicts; I am a self proclaimed LinkedIn addict. I check my LinkedIn account at least ten times per day to see if I’ve received an invitation to connect.

Like most super-users, I am an open-networker, which means that I accept all invitations. I invite everyone I interview or call on to join my LinkedIn network. My linkedin profile is listed in my signature file of my email. I write about using LinkedIn on my blog, and host multiple LinkedIn-centric discussion groups on and off of LinkedIn.com. While traffic varies, I try to add at least 100 new contacts per week to my account.

Another great tool for access to the greater LinkedIn network, is the use of the “LinkedIn Groups”. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at a time, I am a member of 50 groups at all times. Every few weeks, I remove myself from five-to-ten groups and join new ones, to ensure that I am being exposed to a diversity of interests and backgrounds. I answer questions that are relevant to my industry to raise awareness of my subject matter expertise, and end every answer with an invitation to send me an invitation.  LinkedIn only allows you to send out 3,000 invitations to connect, a ceiling I hit over a year ago, so such creative ways are necessary to maintain my steady network growth on the site.

Q:  What are its principal limitations?

Kasekas: A common misconception is that LinkedIn is the new alternative to networking. The belief is that by sitting in front of your computer all day, you can build a solid network of strong relationships that will replace traditional networking. As a LinkedIn-addict I am the first to yell out that this is not the case. LinkedIn is not, and will never be a replacement to traditional networking. It is a tool to help facilitate networking, but nothing more.

Trust does not come cheap, and building trust via inmails and emails, is extremely difficult. I could do more to build trust over a ten minute telephone conversation, or a fifteen-minute coffee than I can do through months or even years of email correspondence. So, our perception of LinkedIn as an end, versus a means is a key limitation of the site.

Once we overcome this perception, the tool, itself, does have another major limitation.  While it is an excellent tool for identifying key decision makers, the effectiveness of the site is limited to the size of your network. LinkedIn only allows you to “see” the names of the people within your network and their contacts twice removed (your first contacts, their friends/contacts and their contacts’ friends). So, for example, if your 1st contacts, or their friends were not connected to Barack Obama directly, you would not be able to find the name of the President of the United States, via LinkedIn.  So, on LinkedIn size does matter.

A superuser grows his LinkedIn network exponentially as a means of building your total contact list, and then picking and choosing whom connect with, within that larger group later on.

The rest of this interview will be published in a later post.