All Networking and No Work Makes Your Business Falter

Three summers ago I headed off to SES San Jose while 7 months pregnant with my daughter Elnora. I was in that tired stage of pregnancy where I mostly wanted to sleep, but the after-hours networking opportunities were plentiful and being fairly social, I didn't think I could afford to miss any of them. After all, networking at events like San Jose is how you make new connections, learn interesting things and have a little fun.

The problem was there were so many networking opportunities that I found myself staying up later and later each night, culminating in not going to be at all my last night in San Jose. I literally returned home from a late networking party in San Francisico in enough time to pack my bags and go snag a cab to the airport for a 6am flight.

While I did manage to pull of an absolute marathon of networking events and parties, I left myself so exhausted that I couldn't remember much of what I'd discussed during the last day or so. I completely over did it and ended up missing out on the valuable networking I'd been loathe to miss.

Last summer when I headed back to SES San Jose while 8 months pregnant with Emmitt, I reminded myself of that summer two years earlier and vowed to be more selective in my networking. I headed to bed early the first and last night of the show and limited myself to one or two events each night coupled with a reasonable bed time. Despite limiting my networking opportunties, I ended up making far better quality contacts and having a much more enjoyable time at the show.

Unfortunately, I see many businesses making the same mistakes in the social media realm that I made during that first San Jose trip.

I was reminded of this when I spotted Valeria's post (via Mack Collier) at Conversation Agent:

In the last three days I received two invitation to join Facebook, one invitation to join Pownce and two inquiries about my Twitter address (see an analysis by USAToday). Mind you, I have a profile on LinkedIn, and an old one on Ryze -- remember that one? Does anyone use it anymore? And let's not forget Jaiku.

Then I got to thinking about my own inbox. Invites to Facebook, to Flickr communities, to "get connected" at LinkedIn, the list goes on and on. Then I got to thinking about the race to be popular on various sites. It started back when Google launched Orkut and everyone was battling to make sure they had the most contacts. Then the fury moved to LinkedIn, where I still get requests to "get connected" with people I've never even heard of. Now I'm seeing it happen with Twitter and some LJ communities.

And I asked myself...how do people keep up with all of them?

Is there a point where you've spread yourself so thin by trying to have a presence everywhere that you end up NOT having a presence anywhere?

I'd wager there is.

In fact, I'd strongly encourage small business owners, and especially one and two man shops to limit themselves to two or three QUALITY networking communities. Any more than that and it becomes difficult to keep up with the conversations and to be an active part of the community.

That's not saying that you shouldn't reserve your name or have a presence on other communities, simply that you should focus in on the ones that will have the highest pay-off for your particular business.

It's the old spread yourself too thin scenario.

Even apart from the inability to maintain a strong presence on all of those communities, you have to ask yourself if the time and energy being spent on those social networks and social communities is taking away from your ability to run your business. After all, if you can't keep track of inventory, or you start ignoring clients, it's not going to matter if you drive new business to your site.

So take some time to analyze your stats to find out which social networking or social community sites are sending you the most engaged traffic. If your snarky comments on Digg drive a ton of engaged traffic to your gadget blog, then by all means, keep it up and abandon MySpace. If your decadent desserts are sending droves of traffic from Flickr, then put your effort there and stop worrying about reddit. If you are an executive recruiter and you score great leads on LinkedIn, then keep your focus there and stop worrying about updating the two people who subscribe to your Twitter feed.

No one can be everywhere, so learn how to maximize the places you are. If you're not anywhere, then start searching for at least one place to build a presence and to become part of the conversation. Just make sure you don't get sucked into the ever expanding world of "just one more network..."