Power Networking and One Degree Connected
Although I really appreciate both networks, LinkedIn and Plaxo haven’t produced any type of meaningful connections for me. Like many other people, I use them to keep my address book up to date, but rarely use them to actually network. Typically, I’ll go to a networking event, bring back the business cards of the folks that I’ve met, and connect with them on LinkedIn.
Plaxo used to be my favorite address book clean-up application, syncing all of my address books… even on my phone and keeping them clean of duplicates, etc. Somewhere along the line, though, Plaxo decided to be a social networking tool and to fight with the likes of LinkedIn. Now it’s just a mess of features and I have a hard time even navigating it.
The return on investment on these tools has been virtually nothing. I did connect with a great contact at Aprimo that led to a nice partnership with Compendium Blogware, but that may have been the only quality connection in 5 years or more.
Last week I met with Howard Bienstock and he introduced me to his rapidly growing networking application, One Degree Connected. The system is quite unique from LinkedIn and Plaxo. Rather than concentrating on who you do know, One Degree Connected was developed to make connections to who you don’t know.
I can simply look up a name, job title, or company within a city/state and One Degree Connected provides me with a list of prospects. If I click on the prospect, I’m met with a list of my contacts who know them. Most importantly, those connections are ranked on how strong they are.
As a result, you don’t just haphazardly connect and bother people like you might on LinkedIn… you actually use the tool to help network and find the right contacts… not just keep your address book up to date. Even better, ODC keeps the riff-raff out by charging a modest monthly fee for the application. As a testament to its effectiveness and non-spaminess, ODC has made about 2,000 connections even though there are close to 250,000 contacts uploaded.
Someone wrote that One Degree Connected may be the LinkedIn killer… they may be right if what you need is a tool to network with. This is an extremely effective way to connect with the business professionals you need to by leveraging your own network.
