Social media riff-raff

Yesterday during the Social Media Plus LinkedIn session, this bit of advice was shared by the speaker and retweeted by the audience:

When I poked back at this chain of thought:

…a couple of the folks clarified a bit:

If LinkedIn or other social networks imposed an actual cost on the number of connections you were permitted to have, then I think this viewpoint might have some validity, but unless your connections are flat out spammers, then there’s no harm in keeping people in your network who aren’t exactly on target for your audience.

Allow me to illustrate some of the riff-raff in my network. Knowing me, knowing who I am and what I do, these people would probably have been culled years ago if I took the above advice.

Here we have this guy:

And this guy:

Remove them from my LinkedIn network right away, right? After all, an applications engineer and an assistant athletic director should be worthless to me as a marketing professional, yes? Not so fast. The applications engineer in 2005? That’s now Chris Brogan.

And the assistant athletic director and freelance writer? That’s now the Social Media Plus conference keynote speaker, Jason Falls.

My counter-advice to the idea of culling the riff-raff from your network is this: look at your social network like a nearly risk-free investment. You can place wild bets on all of the people asking to connect with you, and if you build relationships with them over time, some of them are not going to pan out and some of them are going to be superstars. Some, like the gentlemen above, will completely transcend what their original base of expertise was entirely – but you won’t know that today.

Here’s an analogy to close this topic out: if you planted a field full of corn seeds today, you would be a fool to immediately declare the field a loss tomorrow if none of it had turned into fully grown crops overnight. Likewise, just because your LinkedIn network isn’t full of superstars today, don’t declare it a loss and start culling the riff-raff. Have time, have patience, and work on building the relationships today that will turn into powerful friendships and business partnerships in the weeks and months to come.

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