It's Not the What, It's the How

I really didn't look that hard to find the current guesstimated number of blogs and even if I had found one, I knew it would be out of date once I closed the page. All of which is enough to underscore what we all know already - there are millions of blogs and if you try and visualize all the combinations of how people can now connect with someone else, I am not sure there are enough commas for whatever that number would be.

Anyway, what got me thinking a bit about this was stumbling across a blog called MarketingProfs: Daily Fix authored by Ann Handley. In a recent post she was writing about what she thought was the best invitation she had ever received asking her to "link" with someone on LinkedIn. If you read it, I think you'll agree that it really is very creative and clever, but beyond the creativity of her friend's communication with her, I also read into her post another message, and one which we talk to our members about with great frequency - that is the process of building both reputations and relationships is always about quality, not quantity.

The point being that while each of us, be it on a personal or a professional level, know either intuitively or by experience that our connections and relationships with others is by far the most powerful business and/or career management tool we have. While in the electronic age, saying you have hundreds or even thousands of "connections" sounds impressive, it is a long way, to state the obvious, from measuring the quality or effectiveness of your network.

In my own experience I have always found that in terms of degrees of success or failure it isn't so much what I am trying to achieve so much as how I go about trying to achieve it that really makes the difference.

Ann's buddy Charlie clearly understands all of that and more.