Busines Networking - Your best hope

To get to the Queen requires a few more removes. I must continue the process a third, then a fourth, and eventually a tenth time then any Briton would know every other Briton at a tenth remove, and that would involve the Queen.

The calculation is ludicrous of course but it illustrates a point, if we assume that in business everyone knows ten people and extend our Network of contacts out just four degrees it involves ten thousand people. I know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows ten thousand people. Not quite true of course but you can see where the argument is going.

We have quite close access to a very large group of people!

In modern times we have used this arithmetic phenomenon to our advantage. The mediaeval guilds gave the member a network to use to his advantage whilst excluding the outsider. The Freemasons and the Jews have been accused, rightly or wrongly (in reality probably a bit of both), of forming effective networks for insiders whilst excluding outsiders. In fact it seems to be human nature for every identifiable group to do this, the Jews and Freemasons have just been better at it than most.

At a very local level it happens. The British pub, now in sad decline, performed that function, the various Trade Associations do, though they like the guilds of all perform an incredibly important function of setting industry and trade standards.

The entrepreneur who ignores this fact sets himself at a huge disadvantage – he, or she, sets himself up as an outsider-by- choice.

The newbie entrepreneur needs all the help available: the Chamber of Commerce; the Trade associations; the golf club even all extend his or her network far more effectively than any other low-cost tactic.

The coming of the internet has made networking, easier, faster, and cheaper than it ever was before. Social networks like Facebook or Twitter boost the multipliers in our second paragraph from an ambitious ten to perhaps hundreds. With a bit of judicious self-promotion your circle of friends can rise to several dozen, and their friends to thousands. With 24 Twitter ‘friends’ each of whom has twenty four friends  we have 576 friends within two degrees!

The Internet Generation has not been slow to pick up on this: a Google search on Business networks comes up with 593 million hits! Not all of these will be relevant to your business – or perhaps to any business – but if just a few are they provide the ideal process to get your message out and it will cost you nothing, just your time and effort.

1.       Networking is free advertising – use it;

2.       Contact everyone you know who can help your business get off the ground and get them to help,

3.       And get them to contact everyone they know who can...........

4.       Use the online networks – they do work. They’ve brought down Governments.