It's all in who you know, and who THEY know, and who THEY know, and...

Relationships come in all shapes, sizes, and durations. They're all different, but they each help us in some way or another. Some help us to grow, others to remain a child. Some help us to find out who we really are. Others provide the opportunity to enrich our lives by simply lending a hand where one is needed.

As I was playing with the kids in the driveway the other day, my neighbor poked his head out the window and informed me that his son was out of work. In this economy, he's got a lot of company unfortunately. He was laid off about a month ago, and has been unable to secure a job sense. Knowing that I was in the same general field of work, her asked if I had any leads, suggestions, ideas that I could pass along for his son. I searched my brain for a few moments, and finally asked that he send me his resume and I'd forward it along to those that might be able to help.

I wasn't in a position to hire him, and I'm not sure that my company is either, but over the years, I've built up a little network of people in a similar line of work as mine that might be hiring. And even if my contacts aren't hiring, they might know someone that is. It's all about the network. My neighbor's son's networking had not been enough so far to land him a job, so he expanded his network to his Dad, who expanded it to me, who expanded it to my contacts. The idea is that the larger your network of (qualified) relationships, the more likely it is that you'll get ahold of the right person to accomplish a goal.

The Media are calling it "Social Networking" and have dubbed it the current craze. Sites like MySpace, Friendster, and hundreds more provide a place for people to connect, relate, network, and generally hang out on the 'Net. While these sites focus mainly on social networking, Linked In's focus is on business networking.

LinkedIn allows you to manage, discover, assist, and to get assistance from your network of business contacts. After telling it about who you know (a very easy import task, or enter them manually), they will tell you who is already a LinkedIn member. With this knowledge, you can invite those persons to join, sorry Link to your network. They bring along all of their previous contacts as well, building your network more quickly. Once your network has been established, you have an organically growing group of people that you can tap for all sorts of business related tasks. Track down a connection that works for a company you're having a sales meeting with and get a lay of the land ahead of time. Find people that have a specific skill set or expertise that you need to finish that critical project. Find people that work for companies that are hiring. Find people that you used to work with, but lost track of (it really is a small world; they're likely to turn up as someone else's contacts sooner of later).

Basically, the site works like this: If you find someone that you need to contact, your request is send to the person you know, who knows someone that knows someone that knows the person you want to connect with. Or some abbreviated or drawn out trail similar. At each step along the way, you're using trusted contacts to vouch for the person that sent them the request to forward on. The assumption is that if you're a good person, then you generally have good friends. And if the people you have as contacts as good people, the same assumption is made about them. This strengthens the relationship network and keeps the spammers out.

At the current moment, I have 73 direct connections, but I "have access to" over 300,000 connections who are friends of my friend's friends. There are over 10 million people on the network! Ok, maybe the world isn't so small after all.