On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors

This article has been posted on November 16, 2009 on the Harvard Business site's blog.

In this artcile the author compares the power owners on Twitter and in the workplaces.
She explains the Twitter cycle that is to say that one person gives access to information; in exchange, as a reward, she gets more followers who will bring her more information and so on and in the end, the network will be much bigger and that is what matters.

These people create organizations, networks, 'circles of influence'. But in the career, being technically adept is not enough.
It is necessary to be THE person who created bridges between different people and groups, looking for common points that might create relationships. This person is called a "connector".

These human networks constitute in the end qocial capital, what may able you to find a job and son on for instance. So the connectors are very much powerful. But it is a permanent job. They can not let their network down for a while. They have to keep looking for new contacts, new connections.

As far as I am concerned, I think indeed that the network means everything nowadays. It is really difficult to find a job and most often people hired are the ones who know someone in the firm... And with the development of networks such as Facebook for insance but alos Viadeo which is a professionnal one, it enables a word-to-mouth for job offer for instance. And there also are no more excuses to say that you do not know the right people. But it is true that a network is something which has to be worked on every day.

In the past, the skills which were asked were more "scolar". I mean that once people were hired, they had to do their job in a correct way and that was all. A job could last for30 or 40 years.

Nowadays people have to be aware at each minute, aloways developping their network, keeping in touch, "just in case", because the turn over is much higher. SO social skills are more than necessary. We cannot just do our job in our office and leave at the end of the day. It is a permanent effort which has to be done.

Thos skills cannot really be learned according to be. What is necessary is that once we have understood that, it is necessary to play the game... without loosing time.

But if the connector skills are really important -searching for new key contacts- the formal asignments are indispensable. Indeed, it is a prove of the job value, what can really be done. Indeed, having a great network but not being able to do the jobs cannot be successful. And people members of the network will be aware of that one day or another, and it might ruin the network.