I’ve just passed the 500 mark on LinkedIn and it feels wrong. Let me explain. I can’t possible know 500 people. I’m fascinated and largely persuaded by the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
His theory known as ‘Dunbar’s number’ is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships. That’s the sort where I know someone, they know me and we understand our relationship. It is commonly held to be around 150. Dunbar says the “limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size”.
So how did I get here, my LinkedIn group was a list of people who I knew well personally or more commonly had worked with as colleagues, client, supplier or partners in various projects. So what went wrong? Why don’t I really know all of the people who I purport on-line to be connected to? Here is my list of ways in which I think it’s gone wrong.
- I’ve been on LinkedIn for around five years. Some people I knew well then, I don’t know well any more.
- In building up my initial contact list I was probably over enthusiastic about finding and adding people.
- A desire not to offend. I wrote a note to someone a couple of years ago politely declining an invitation to connect as we had no previous connection. I received a vitriolic reply. I still decline these invitations but accept others where the connection is tenuous.
- Confusion. I think many people have a different view to mine on the nature of LinkedIn and networking on-line in general.
It may not matter but my network is clearly, to me and anyone that looks in, now a loose one. LinkedIn doesn’t annotate my actual number of connections any more. I’m like many other people a 500+.
Is there something I should do differently? There probably is. I should regard my online network as the loose association that it is and concentrate more on my real world network. Obvious when you think about it.
It began with a conversation in the Blackdog Ballroom with Dom Burch. He is about to take a six month sabbatical from his role as Head of Corporate Communications at ASDA and he has a new twitter profile to mark the occasion. I then saw on twitter that the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is moving to ITV and will therefore cease to be @BBCLauraK; re-emerging in the autumn as @ITVLauraK.
Earlier today San Francisco web developer Joe Johnston launched his contribution to the social web with a small post via his twitter account @simple10. It said simply “connect.me beta sign-up launched 
I have read a couple of posts recently by leading PR evangelists talking in disparaging terms about ‘pimping’ blogs in social networks. It seems that it is unseemly to post too many links to your own scribblings in twitter and elsewhere.
PR and the Social Web 