What Color Is Your Parachute?

To Your Close Friends	Your time, laughter, wisdom, playfulness, your car keys (when out drinking together)	Their time, their wisdom, ideas, companionship, affection
To Your Co-workers	Help with their difficulties at work, tasks too big for them	If they’re there when you first arrive, teaching you the ropes
To Your Boss	Your time, your talents, your skills, and experience, plus dependability	Money (certainly), appreciation for what you’ve done there (sometimes)
To Your Acquaintances	Encouragement, appreciation	Ideas, support, their experience and learnings
To Your Network	What you’ve learned from your Informational Interviewing within their industry	Information, and (in some cases) a bridge between you and an organization you are trying to get into

I can illustrate the final entry on this chart—your relationship to your network—very simply. When we are out of work, we begin collecting names for two purposes down the road: information, and introduction.

I’ve been talking as though the introduction side of networking—finding “bridge- people” who bridge the gap between you and a job—is the only purpose of networking. But clearly it isn’t. There is also the information-gathering side of networking, preceding the need for any introductions. Its $64,000 question is: is this a place where I could put my talents, gifts, skills and experience to their best and most effective use?

A job-hunter named Bill N. had worked for a number of years in retail; now he was debating moving over to the oil industry. That meant, he had to first learn a lot, because he knew virtually nothing about the oil industry. So, he went from person to person who worked at companies in that industry, just seeking information about the industry. But the more of these “informational interviews” he conducted, the more he knew. In fact, coming down the home stretch—still interviewing people at companies in that industry—he found he now knew more than they usually did, about their competitors. He was therefore able to give them an overview that they had never had the time to go gather, themselves.

In other words, he was no longer just gathering information, he was also dispensing it. His networking was no longer just take; it was also give. He no longer felt that networking was just using people. It had become a two-way street.

So when you are out of work, and you begin networking, all you need is the firm resolve that you will find ways to give as well as take from the people you approach, and you too need no longer feel that networking is just using people.

NETWORKING IN THESE DAYS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Networking has greatly changed from what it was, oh, even ten years ago. I said earlier that fish swim in water, humans swim in a social context. With the advent of social media on the Web, we are no longer just swimming in a pool; we have moved to an ocean.

Thanks to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, YouTube, TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, MakeProjects, GroupMe, and similar—communities gather,[20] share information, make recommendations, aid decision-making, foster cooperation and invention, plus new ways to work,[21] and new ways to get in touch with each other—it is an ocean indeed.

Information and Introduction. It’s so much easier now to do networking as information- gathering, or networking as a search for “bridge-people,” than was ever possible before. It used to be an agonizing desperate search for the right people. Now, for anybody with even a modest acquaintance with social media, that search is one hundred times easier. Faster. More accurate. And, less time-consuming.

Here are a few background thoughts about social media:

1. Mastery of social media is becoming important to employers, with the result that there are actually job- titles for people with this expertise: online community manager, social media analyst, chief social media officer, and even chief listening officer (responsible for seeing the company actually listens, and responds, to what’s being said out there—something that Toyota, for example, failed to do, according to a recent study[22]).

2. There are tools for creating social networks where none existed before, particularly within your own company, like https://yammer.com.

3. Each social media site has a different scope, a different emphasis, and a different audience. Look for the things that matter to you. Choose a site appropriately. If you have a particular issue, and you just don’t know how to find the appropriate social site, do a search on Google. For example, if ex-military who are hunting for help in getting back into civilian life, Google “ex-military job-hunting” they will turn up a number of sites to help them with that job-hunt, such as: www.jobswap.com, www.dol.gov/vets, LinkedIn.com (hashtag[23] ©US Army), www.hireds.com, http://fedshirevets.gov, and www.woundedwarriorproject.org.

4. You can stay up-to-date on social media developments, by subscribing to the free daily e-mail called Smartbrief on Social Media. Sign up at www.smartbrief.com/socialmedia.

5. For an extensive list of current social networking websites go to http://tinyurl.com/k2jhx. You can click on the little icon immediately beneath “Global Alexa Page Ranking” and get them listed in their order of popularity (from “Most Popular” down to “Least Popular”).

Now let’s look at some of the most popular social media sites, and see how they might be helpful with your networking:

LinkedIn

Website url: www.linkedin.com

Background: Business-oriented networking website. 100+ million users worldwide, with more than 44 million of them in the U.S.

General Description: 70 to 90 percent of employers, depending on which survey you look at, use LinkedIn for trolling in general, or researching a job-hunter in particular.