
Networking: How do you manage your network and stay in touch with your key contacts? - jamiequint

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danw
I'd quite like something like this for my mobile http://people.interaction-
ivrea.it/s.blyth/mysocialfabric/design.html

As for answering the actual question, everything is done on my mobile phone,
business cards and facebook. Everyone I know well (close friends, housemates
etc) are on my mobile. All my aquaintances from university I keep touch with
on facebook. Facebook reminds me of birthdays and tells me what their up to in
my news feed. Finally I keep all my business contacts in piles of business
cards on my desk. One pile for archive, one for people I need to contact soon
and one for people I'm awaiting response from. I can even easily tag people by
writing metadata on the back of the card.

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jamiequint
The mysocialfabric idea is interesting, the only problem I see with it is that
there is a significant barrier towards adding somebody as a contact (you have
to configure an avatar for them - what if you have never met them in person
and don't know what they look like?) and I don't see how it scales (what does
the screen look like when you have 200 contacts) especially on a mobile.
Thanks for the answer, thats an interesting way to do it.

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jamiequint
Networking is a vital part of being successful in the business world,
connections and human capital can be just as important as cash and
intellectual capital. What tools (e.g. email, notebook, post its) do you use
to manage your interactions with people, and how do you use this information
to further develop your relationships?

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hwork
37Signals' Highrise -- not out yet -- could prove to be a good way of doing
it. I can say that I'm certainly excited. Check out the preview post here:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/265-preview-1-an-introduction-to-highrise-
the-product-previously-known-as-sunrise

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jamiequint
yeah I've been following that, the reason I asked this question is I've been
working on a product since November that is doing something similar (I was
hoping that 37 Signals' product was going to be more CRM-ish) I still think
(from what 37 Signals shown so far) that there is still a tool that caters
more towards individuals managing their personal networks (a niche within the
contact management niche if you will). Any thoughts on this?

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Elfan
There happens to be a social networking site for old fashion networking.
http://www.linkedin.com/

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jamiequint
Thanks for the link Elfan, I'm already a part of LinkedIn, but I think it is
more of a tool for visualizing your connections not managing relationships.
What do you think?

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Elfan
I'm in college so I don't have that many direct connections and its how I have
managed to stay in contact with people from summer work. I'm not sure how it
will scale for me in the future.

But I'm *awful* at maintaining friendships, networks, and things for that
nature. So I'm not a good person to take advice from on this.

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jamiequint
I'm in college too, actually, I've found facebook to be a good networking
tool, especially some of the the global groups (there are a few good
entrepreneurship ones), I've made some interesting connections through it.

