Shawn Callahan writes
Whilst on the train today I was thinking that I hadn’t heard of the opposite approach whereby we identify people who would benefit from participating in a community and then link them up. Linking people to relevant and interesting communities should be a key responsibilities of managers but I suspect this will not occur regularly until managers fully value the role of communities in their business. I imagine the process of identifying people who aren’t connected that should be - and to where - would be a non-trivial exercise.
I’m not sure the process is a non-trivial exercise. Yes, it takes time and effort but I put together a community/mailing list of over 1,000 people around the globe at Arthur Andersen by:
- Identifying those people I did know
- Asking for references to those I didn’t
- Speaking with them personally to make a connection and also to make a request of who they knew
- Using whatever channel available for publicity of the community
This works on the premise that nobody is totally isolated and networking will get the message through. Today I met Shawn in person as a case in point. How? By asking my community and looking at the online places that I frequent.