_MY_ Contacts!

It's difficult to see the professional value of a professional networking site like Linkedin when the users of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are overwhelmingly youth-based, only containing links to favorite bands and compromising pictures at wild house parties. Of course, this is assuming you are not part of a event promotion agency or the like.

In any case, one cannot argue the strength of networks: knowing someone, or knowing someone that knows someone. Harnessing the power of such links through software that organizes those links via how strong the relationship is, is of course only part of the picture. Companies that use social networking tools internally are always asking themselves how to gain more participation from their employees.

I don't think of myself as the most popular in my circles of friends, but it's hard to ignore that when people don't know how to get in touch with someone at a party I've hosted or some big dinner I attended with them, they usually go through me, and I go through my supposed extensive list of contacts in my address book. So I guess, in my little band of thieves, I am the connector.

However, sometimes I won't know a contact very well, and yet that someone still wants me to get them in touch with a friend. Or vice-versa, I won't really know how to get a friend in touch with someone I don't really know, because they were a friend of a friend that was invited last minute. I am all for meeting new people, but I cannot vouch for someone I do not know, nor can I freely give contact information of a friend over to a stranger, because I don't know what the stranger will do with it, nor will my friend be happy I did so.

I can easily imagine this problem surfacing in a company attempting to leverage social networking software internally: how does an employer incentivise sharing contacts with a bunch of strangers, albeit in your own company? *I* would find it hard. The CFO article does a good job of lightly addressing the concern. It suggests using well positioned cash-incentives, as well as making examples of upper management; company loyalty and spirit are not always sufficient. Heck, make it part of your PMP and tie it to bonuses.

Which still leaves me the same problem in my social life. If I could somehow get people to pay me for accessing my address book, I would be set.