Featured Guest Blogger: Jason Kent, P.E.

A few days ago I attended a business networking event hosted by my city’s Chamber of Commerce. As the president of my university’s local alumni chapter, I invited local alumni and friends to attend and network with each other and with members of the business community. It was a fun couple of hours, and I met people from different industries that I usually don’t come in contact with in my career as a civil engineer. There were about 70 people at the event, and I knew about 10 of them – most of them through my alumni chapter, but also some friends and family. I made sure that I introduced my contacts to each other – many of whom had not met before. At the end of the event, I had several people approach me to thank me for connecting them with other people that I knew. The social media marketer that met the video production assistant. The events coordinator that met the winery manager. My friend Shannon, who is considering a career change to community relations, whom I introduced to my friend Gary, a community relations professional. I also benefited immediately, as I met an alumnus that I didn’t have on my mailing list.

In his book Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi describes this process as “social arbitrage,” a term that implies that something is being traded or bartered in the transaction between your contacts. You are trading to your contact your knowledge of people within your network with an unknown future benefit in return. I like to call this process “internetworking.” According to Wikipedia, internetworking defines the practice of connecting a computer network with other networks, and is the base for a very familiar term: internet. Just like a computer network, you can act as the server that connects one terminal to another. But these terminals are people – your people, your coworkers, your friends. [Read more...]