LinkedIn claims to let you “stay in touch with your network”, but what does that mean? If keeping lists of names and numbers is staying in touch with your network I’d say most people do an excellent job, but lists of names and numbers are meaningless. Valuable personal networks are built on meaningful relationships. You can have the contact info for 1000 people and no matter how powerful those people might be you have a worthless network if you don’t keep in touch with them in some way.
What tools do people use to track their networks currently? Besides LinkedIn and Address Book (Outlook, Plaxo, etc.) there is only one that effectively tracks interactions, its called email, and in the volume that most people send and receive its the signal to noise ratio is entirely too high to support this. These solutions are inefficient and ineffective.
Since November I’ve been working on an app that will help you maximize the value of your personal network. Its smarter contact management for networkers. I’m aiming to launch by April 1st. Stay tuned to peepflow.com for updates.
UPDATE (07/24/07): I am now working on this idea full time with a small team, stay tuned to peepflow.com for updates.
I recently had a chat with Adam from Xobni (xobni.com) about maximizing the usefulness of email. They’re doing some interesting things over there that you might want to check out. I’ll keep an eye out for peepflow — good luck!
Daniel Ha
March 12th, 2007
Facebook is also a great “touch-base” tool to maintain relationships. You just need to look through all of the social networking features with a task-focused perspective. I wish business people would use it more.
Sheraan
June 1st, 2007