MaRS

Networking: The roots of your resilient business

Is our success in business as dependent on networking as we think? The answer is “yes”.

That seemed to be the general consensus at the CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 session on December 17th. An interesting aspect to this is: if you polled 100 people 15 years ago and asked them what had made them successful in their chosen career, perhaps 1-5 people might have said being a part of “the old boy’s network” or meeting the right people at the right time. They would not have said that networking is a strategy — a learned skill that is essential to growing your business or getting a job.

"Cap rate": The human potential of communities and cultures

I am not a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. Let me re-phrase that: I don’t mind Malcolm Gladwell. But I must admit, I was particularly excited when he was billed with Mark Kingwell in “Well Well, an evening of dialogue on social change.” To my dismay, the double threat was not as hard hitting as I thought it would be. Gladwell took some of the best social marketing campaigns that have changed behaviours (like anti-smoking and seatbelts) to illustrate his point that many things – not just communication – are required to tip a system.

Networking: more than just a business card

As the saying goes, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. In today’s business and innovation world, it’s hard to disagree with a statement like that. It’s hard to get into any high level industry or research position and impossible to grow your company without collaborating or networking.

Networking is sometimes treated as a shameless word with its reputation of being phony or fake, but in reality, it can honestly be one of your strongest tools in evolving your career. There are those  who roam around networking sessions passing out their business cards to every face they see, sometimes without saying a word. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

I was catching up on outstanding messages in Facebook and LinkedIn yesterday and wondered why I was bothering. Unlike Peter Evans, I don’t like and am not very good at networking. That may also explain why I have no friends and thus tend to ignore Facebook. (I tried Twitter as well but decided that I didn’t need one more intrusion in my life of quiet contemplation.) It got me wondering about how these social networking sites are making any money. I’m sure their user stats contain lots of anti-social types such as me. On the other hand, these sites also contain addicts that use them all the time.

Fortunately, I blundered onto an article in MIT’s Technology Review (July/August 2008) on “The Next Bubble: The Future of Web 2.0.” The article, which deals with social networking as a business, pretty well concludes that social networks don’t have a business future. Much like the vanished portals of yesterday, these shining stars of today are fated to a life of irrelevance as they can’t figure out how to monetize their eyeballs and even those eyeballs will go away when something more cool emerges.

If you’re a scientist — and even if you have just peaked into the science world from time to time — you KNOW Nature, the mammoth scientific publishing group. But did you know about their social media tool for scientists, Nature Network? It’s hopping with important conversations and meaningful connections. Some call it the Facebook for scientists.

Until recently, you could only join Boston and London (UK) hubs on the Nature Network. Everyone else was dumped into the “global” category. Now, they’re opening up hubs for the city that brings the most members to the community. And we’re thinking Toronto should be the next big science city on the list!

So why Nature Network?