Cultivate your network

Once you have created a social network, it has to be maintained. In this note I describe three strategies to help you maintain your network. This is part two of three.


Relationships decay over time without cultivation. It is sad, but a fact of life. After graduation your fellow students move to different cities, get promoted to more demanding jobs, travel for business or decide to have children. Factors such as these put competing demands on time and as a consequence a number of relationships are unconsciously dropped.

Unfortunately, the relationships that can be used for brokerage across network clusters have a tendency to decay faster than other relationships. If you are not careful you might end up with a dense, homogenous network with people similar to yourself. Decay happens to everyone, but experienced networkers have a slower decay rate and thus lose fewer people over time. One benefit of business school alumni networks is that the relationships never totally decay. It can be tempting to consider the entire alumni network as a dormant network. However, remember that this is only partially true as all networks thrive on being cultivated.

To slow down decay, we propose three strategies for cultivating your network. These strategies also apply to relationships that you planted before business school.

Strategy 1. Keep track of your network. If you do not keep track of your social network in a systematic manner, you risk that otherwise working relationships will decay. When your network grows and time passes, it is increasingly difficult to rely on memory to keep track of the network that you have planted. Memory is selective and it is likely that you first will forget the weak relationships that contribute the most to diversity in your network. Before the advent of computers, people used address books and Rolodex systems to manage their relationships. This made it possible to store names, addresses, occupation, and maybe some background information. You should definitely not be satisfied with the pre-computer generation of social networking products. We refer to the section “IT-tools for Network Cultivation” for suggestions of how to use IT-support to cultivate your network. A key advantage with IT support is that it facilitates cultivation of a larger network.

Strategy 2. Keep in touch with your social network through periodic low intensity activities. During the first ten years after graduating, you are likely to be busy in a functional career and with raising children. This is not the easiest time to engage in extensive network planting outside your industry and immediate work environment. At this stage of your career, your best strategy is to focus your limited time and energy on cultivating the relationships you developed at business school and in other social settings. Otherwise there is a clear risk that you will end up with a dense network focused on your current industry and work location. Alumni social events are good ways to keep in touch, but not all of your peers will attend these events. When traveling to a foreign city it might not be possible to meet for dinner, but it is always possible to ask members in your network for some sightseeing advice. You will survive without this advice, but it gives the people in your network a chance to help you as well as making your stay slightly more pleasurable. Generally, do not be afraid to ask your network connections for information and advice. If you are applying for a new job or pitching a new sales idea, it is useful to contact somebody in your network working for the organization and ask some questions.

Other ways to keep in touch include sending personalized seasonal greeting cards or email messages when a major positive event occurs in your life. Given the ubiquity of electronic communication in normal working life, it is sometimes a good idea to write a short note by hand or make a telephone call when cultivating your network. If you have had low intensity contact, class reunions are an excellent way to further cultivate your network with face-to-face interaction. This also provides an opportunity to re-start some relationships that might have decayed since business school. However, without preceding low intensity contacts, you will not be able to accomplish as much during the class reunion. If you are able to devote more time, simply increase the intensity and frequency of contacts with fellow alumni. You can also take an active role in the national alumni association of your business school. Do not consider such work as a chore, but rather as an opportunity to cultivate your network.

Strategy 3. Connect people in your network that can potentially benefit from each other. A more demanding approach to cultivating your network is to act as a broker and connect people that might potentially benefit from each other. Once your network grows, there will be many such opportunities. You can take a more active role in the national or regional alumni association to make it easier to connect people. You can also use IT support to identify potential connections between people.

If you are traveling to a city in which you have several former business school colleagues, you might consider getting them together for a good meal in a restaurant or you might even borrow somebody’s kitchen and throw a dinner party at their house. In addition to meeting several colleagues during your short stay, your guests will enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company. If a business school colleague is visiting your city together with business associates, you can offer to show them all around the city or to meet up for drinks. Your business school colleague will probably be grateful for this initiative and you also get a chance to network with his or her business associates. If you are willing to spend the time and energy there are many potential ways to connect individuals in your network.

IT-tools for network cultivation 

Contact management software represents the first generation of social networking software (e.g. Act!, Goldmine). Today, email clients also have some of this functionality (e.g. Microsoft Outlook). The contact management software packages are primarily designed for salespeople, but can be used by anyone who wants to keep track of relationships. The software consists of a database with user-generated information about relationships. The flexible nature of the database can be used to add data and comments relating to each contact. This latter functionality is especially important since a quick history of small comments over time creates an aid for memory. In addition, such information can be of tremendous value in assessing reliability and willingness to contribute. The database can also help you create linkages based on common interests in your network and better understand the needs of the people in your network. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with this software even though you might decide not to use it due to the high setup cost of entering all information manually.

The next generation of social networking software was initiated by the website sixdegrees.com in 1997. In retrospect, this turned out to be too early, but similar products entered the market around five years later. Currently there are a number of such social networking websites (e.g. linkedin.com, facebook.com, friendster.com, myspace.com, orkut.com). These solutions are still novel and it is too early to recommend a specific approach to their usage. However, social networking websites appear to be far too important to ignore until solid evidence of their importance has been established by research. We recommend that you experiment with these sites. One user might decide to use linkedin.com for professional networking and facebook.com for friendship networks. Forwarding referrals in linkedin.com can successfully be used as a way to cultivate your existing relationships. The referral gives you a perfect excuse to initiate contact with a member of your social network. The contacts can also be scanned for potential, overlooked commonalities, which can be used to introduce two members to each other. Another user might decide to only use facebook.com, but use it more actively for network cultivation. 

Only time will tell if the 2007 craze of being bitten by a vampire on facebook.com will have any benefit in terms of networking! Currently, no software combines the benefits of contact management software and social networking software. The next generation software is likely to combine a desktop application for user-entered content (e.g. special interests, things in common, sensitive information) with automatic updating from social networking websites of certain contact-entered information (e.g. change of job positions, birthdays, education).

This was written five years ago together with Andreas Birnik. The paper was written from the perspective of an MBA student, but it is equally relevant for undergraduate students. This is an edited version. Comments are appreciated!