(Newswire.net — May 29, 2013) Austin, TX — If you’re one of “those people” who have several hundred or even 500+ connections next to your LinkedIn profile, you most likely don’t really know the majority of those people.
Steve Harper, a business consultant and author of The Ripple Effect: Maximizing the power of relationships for your life and business says, “People don’t consider their network to be any stronger with 500+ contacts than when they only had a few dozen connections. They want quality, but instead they’ve buried their most valuable connections in an electronic version of their old Rolodex.”
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar a professor at the University of Oxford formulated that there is a cognitive limit of 150 key relationships one person can maintain. Although there is some disagreement among experts on the exact number, most agree that the maximum quantity is somewhere between 150 to 250 individuals.
This appears to be one of those instances where more is not necessarily better. Harper states, “I make it a point to know all my LinkedIn connections, but I also know there are a few special ones in there. I try to make sure to keep in touch with those key connections on a regular basis.”
According to Forbes, “with more than 161 million professional users in its network, LinkedIn is now the “must-have” tool for corporate recruiters around the world.” In such a growth market, several niche applications have appeared in the market to help LinkedIn users leverage their connections.
Austin, TX based Promptivate for example, specializes in identifying and notifying users to reach out to key connections. Drew Bixby, co-founder of Promptivate a personal relationship management application says “our on-line software not only reminds users to follow up with key contacts at the right time, but it also provides specific suggested actions a user can take to engage those contacts.” It might be as simple as lunch, coffee, re-tweeting a message or writing a LinkedIn recommendation. We pull together feeds from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to make it easy to find ways to stay in touch. “Promptivate provides that gentle nudge that people need,” adds Bixby.
Harper is an advocate for building deeper relationships with fewer people rather than having hundreds of contacts that you hardly know. In his book Harper recommends building strong relationships, which requires you to stay in contact with someone and get to know them as a person first. Harper believes that everyone should have at least 10 personal and 10 professional connections outside their immediate family that they can turn to in a crisis. “These are people who will unconditionally be there to help when needed.”
Bixby and his staff conducted over one hundred interviews prior to building their prototype. “The most frequently cited issue,” says Bixby, “was that people did not know what action to take with their key relationships.” Personal relationship management tools like Promptivate may become the next wave in social media by helping user build deep relationships with several individuals among a multitude of connections. This may provide a way to sort through the overwhelming clutter of contacts to identify a few select “diamonds.”
For information about Promptivate visit www.promptivate.com
###
Contact Promptivate – Personal Relationship Manager
Drew Bixby – Founder
Phone: 252.220.0021
Email: drew@promptivate.com
http://www.promptivate.com