Weak and strong ties: expanding the universe

Jacob Morgan has an interesting post on Dunbars Number and what they mean in the context of building relationships. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Wikipedia says:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.^[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

I don’t know about you but when I was in practice I could have ‘relationships’ with say 200 clients but I would hardly call them ’stable’ from a social perspective or even terribly social. When managing people, I was lucky if I could keep the balls in the air for 10 people, something I am told is a commonplace phenomenon. This is the point Jacob picks up when he talks about ’strong’ and ‘weak’ ties.

Strong ties represent the people you are most close to. The people you’re most likely to call as immediate colleagues, friends and so on. Weak ties are people that you may occasionally come across but from whom you might also derive fresh value. When I think of my Twitter followers – there are around 4,950 of them. I don’t follow them all. I follow about 1,500 and even then I only see a fraction of that number appear in my Twitterstream. Those are choices I’ve made based on what I see as relevance to the things in which I am interested. Jacob’s observation that:

What social networks have allowed us to do is to build massive networks of weak ties.  I use these weak ties all the time to reach out to folks for guest articles, business requests, speaking engagements, or ideas and advice.  The mere fact that we are connected to people online creates a type of weak tie because you can always reach out to the person you are connected with.  This is something I do quite a bit when I’m traveling.  I take a look at my network to see who I’m connected to in a particular geographical area, then I reach out to that person and try to arrange to meet in person.

…makes a huge amount of sense. Whenever I travel I do much the same thing. It has brought me into contact with many people I would never otherwise have come across. It has also opened the door to new opportunities that again, I may never have found or even been aware existed.

The big question for professionals who see their relationships as most often built on a 1-2-1 basis: can such networks add value to what you do? 1-2-1 doesn’t scale, but social networks allow us to scale dramatically. My answer therefore is an unequivocal ‘yes.’ For example: a piece I wrote about ‘customer voice‘ didn’t get a huge amount of traction but it brought me into contact with someone who offered me a pitch. They’d looked around at what I do, see who I am connected with and were able to determine I might have something to offer a third party. See how it works? The other person is someone I’d designate a weak tie. Over time they might become a strong tie. We’ll see.

As an aside, the post also shows up on The E2.0 Adoption Council Community site. It aggregates people who talk about this stuff. Some of it is interesting.

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