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Thoughts on an app for "Automated Analytics-Based Networking Recommendations"
Tonight I went to a networking event, a fundraiser for The Adventure Project, which supports social entrepreneurs in 4 developing countries. I did my usual networking thing, my business cards in one pocket, others’ in another, and a pen in the belt loop of my pants, as efficient at taking notes on who’s doing what and how to connect them as always.
Another thing this morning that made me think was a comment by a college friend (Amy) that she gets a kick out of watching me amass knowledge and share things I learn with the right people.
But I got to thinking…the number of people I can meet in my life is finite. Is there a better, more efficient, more scalable and faster way to introduce people to their optimal networking counterparts than the slow process of one by one introducing people to each other and forming “triads” (as noted in the book Tribal Leadership)? And given that the field of Big Data Analytics is taking off, shouldn’t there be a way to write some sort of software program or analytical model to scrape public web data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe integrate with websites about who’s who on the Clinton Global Initiative, etc. and connect networks to networks rather than individuals to individuals?
The thing is, some data analytics companies already do social network analysis, but they do it for those who can pay for it – big companies. Fraud in credit card networks, counter-terrorism analysis sponsored by governments, etc. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the market for “social/professional network optimization” or “connecting networks to networks” or mining the Internet (plus perhaps proprietary databases, if such a tool were to aggregate data)…because who would pay for it? I’m sure that the marketing departments of Fortune 500 companies want to better understand the life cycles of their customers, e.g. understanding that a middle aged credit card holder who has kids should get offers tailored towards the teenagers because the teenagers will probably be likely to get credit cards in their 20s and their parents supervise their finances in their teenage years.
But who would have the funding to create the uber-network-of-networks to understand exactly how everyone in the world is connected, and given certain parameters (location, professional interests, languages spoken), suggest certain connections that would be optimal for a given individual’s career?
And yet….would we even want such an analytics platform on a network-of-networks to exist? The irony is, to make that truly a network of networks would require in-person/on-foot data gathering, and the web-scraping aspect of things assumes that a lot of the world is online, whereas those who would most benefit from it may be rural farmers limited to accessing global market information from SMS messages about crop prices, not streaming TED talks on an expensive laptop with broadband Internet. To truly connect the world, you first have to get everyone online. To find the optimal connections between people to move us all collectively forward – that’s messy, not only because of the data collection involved, or even any complex analytics, but because at the core, networking is actually a moral issue.
Would you want to be connected to someone via a recommendation the same way that Amazon.com or Netflix recommends things to buy or watch? Would it have the same emotional impact or urgency as an email from a friend? I’m not sure. It also might come across as creepy, although increasingly, tech companies assume people will continue to give up their privacy in return for free access to a variety of useful applications. I don’t see this trend stopping (except for the occasional Luddites here and there), but the point is…. Technology may find optimal solutions for human issues, but it doesn’t give us solutions to moral ones. We as human beings may be limited in our capacity to meet face to face, to make introductions, to move forward, and technological tools could certainly increase the efficiency of that – but is there a point where “automated networking recommendations” could be both monetized and moral?
I’m not sure, and I don’t have any answers yet, but it’s worth thinking about.
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