| Hey HN, I would like your advice on how to assess potential inter-business or inter-institutional relationships for any sort of industry. By relationships, I mean any connection between two businesses. For example, how can you tell a local independent grocer that his business would benefit from initiating a relationship with Business X. Business X could be a supplier, another neighborhood grocer looking for a partnership (why?), a local website that specializes in promoting local grocers, etc. In other words, how does one identify a business's potential for making mutually beneficial connections? If you were to build a one-size-fits-all template to assess this type of potential for any sort of business in order to facilitate these connections, what variables would you look at - size, location, etc.? I have been thinking about these questions for a while now, but hit a wall recently. I thought I would pose this to some other minds. w |
I know you are trying to address a classic problem that excellent networkers solve all the time (e.g. "You should talk to my friend Joe"). However, they are connecting people they already know. Even if you were able to figure out what businesses should connect, you will probably need who at those particular businesses should be connected. I don't think you can remove the human element from networking. LinkedIn succeeds because they are a powerful tool for managing a professional network and a lesser tool for reputation scoring (other startups are addressing that - check out http://anthillz.com). They do have a 'people you might want to add as a connection' but they pretty much remain in the background. LinkedIn is going to be hard to beat - they have the data and have gone beyond critical mass.