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The Essence of Great Introductions Is Not Who You Know But Who You Are

In today’s world, making introductions between people has become an anchor activity of professional life. Facebook, LinkedIn, and myriad other contact management tools have given us better information about the people we know that ever before, significantly decreasing the cost of connecting.

Yet better information about our networks and lower cost of connection has come with other consequences, as well. Now, more than ever, to be an effective connector or to find effective connections is not just a matter of knowing people who know people. Instead, what matters most is the weight of the reputation behind the connection and in turn, the likelihood that all parties will engage with it seriously.

The Commodification of Connection

Across 600 million users, the average Facebook user has over a hundred friends. If you looked only at younger users and at  professionals, that number would likely be close to, if not above, 1000. The breadth of the user base means it is the modern world’s biggest phonebook and rolodex all rolled into one. Between Facebook, LinkedIn, and your email contacts, everyone you could ever want to communicate with is a single click away.

The omnipresent rise of social media has seen an attendant increase in professional introductions, and day-in and day-out, todays professionals are facilitating introductions for their peers to potential clients, investors, partners, and more. What used to take an actual introductory meeting over lunch now happens with a few keystrokes. There are a number of recent startups that are optimizing the actual mechanics to an even greater degree than ever before.

This is a fundamentally good thing. More connections means more value being exchange and created. But just being able to make or get an introduction doesn’t make that introduction successful, and optimizing the mechanism by which it happens can only help so much. Ultimately, the value of any professional connection is determined by the weight of the reputation of the person making it.

The Rise of Reputation

I live in San Francisco. That means that, simply by physical proximity, I have 1-degree connections with a huge number of venture investors. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons I moved here. When I first arrived, however, I was coming out of the nonprofit space and most of my connections to investors were through friends that have nothing to do with the field of web entrepreneurship. It didn’t matter whether or not their investor friends had great personal respect for them – their introductions did me little good.

What was at work in this situation was a challenge that is more general than nonprofits or Silicon Valley. Every successful person has (or certainly at least feels like they have) too little time. When they are introduced to a new contact, they have to make a snap judgement about valuable the connection is going to be and how much attention to give it. This doesn’t mean these judgements are right, but they are a fact.

The primary determinant of those judgements is the reputation of the person making the introduction. In this circumstance, “reputation” does not really refer to some objective and overarching personal brand, but to more contextual factors, including the previous experience the person getting the introduction has had with the introducer, and the introducer’s expertise and experience in the particularly area of the connection. This is why online reputation systems are so hard to design; when it comes down to the micro level of connections, specific context greatly trumps generalities about a person’s power to distribute or amplify messages.

In the case of my nonprofit connections introducing me to venture investors, the problem was not that those investors didn’t like the person connecting us and not even that they didn’t have a great professional respect for them. It was simply that the investors did not assume that the person I had making introductions knew what they wanted in business relationships (in this case, in prospective investments), because they were in a fundamentally different business. This lead to, at best, a low level of engagement, and at worst, an actual pigeon-holing as not worth their time even before I had pitched.

The Essence of Great Introdcutions

If the previous was the story of connections that aren’t effective, what makes for an effective introduction? For Valley investors, what I’ve experienced personally and what the consensus seems to be is that the best introductions for entrepreneurs seeking funds come from existing portfolio companies or other committed investors. While this is context specific, it follows a more general pattern that has nothing to do with web startups. The most successful introductions come from people who have:

1. Relevant Shared Experiences: This is maybe the most important element. “Relevant shared experience” means that the person being introduced and the person doing the introduction have worked together or have some other shared experience in the context of the introduction. An example might be a portfolio company introducing a friends’ startup to one of their investors. Relevant shared experience is the thing that assures the person being introduced that the introducer knows what they’re talking about.

2. Positive Interpersonal Track Record: This refers to a previous record of success in making similar sorts of connections. To extend the Silicon Valley metaphor, if my friend is introducing me to his investor, that introduction is going to be even more valuable if he was the person who introduced the investor’s last three investments. The reverse is also true. Even if I have a great introduction from a person with relevant shared experience, if that person has consistently sent bad deals to the investor, that doesn’t bode well for me.

3. Likelihood of Future Power: Most people are relatively strategic, and know intuitively that if a person is in a position of authority or is headed in that direction, paying more attention to the connections and introductions they make just makes sense. I use “likelihood of future power” as a catchall to describe that authority, influence, etc.

The Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The goal for connectors ultimately must be to establish a reputation that allows you to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Put differently, when you make an introduction, you want the parties to think “man, if that person made this connection, I definitely want to pay attention.” That takes time, discipline, and a focus on quality rather than quantity of relationships. For people looking for mission-critical introductions for your projects or companies, finding connectors who can leverage their reputation to get the person they’re introducing you to pay attention has to be the goal.

Ultimately, the point is this: for highly effective connections, reputation matters more than an ability to know a lot of people. Reputation is not, primarily, about metrics like the number of Twitter followers, but about relevant shared experience, interpersonal track record, and likelihood of future power. Find or create those three circumstances in your essential introductions, and incredible things can happen.

kFor anyone interested in diving deeper into online reputation and influence, we recommend checking out Klout’s company blog. Klout is taking on the difficult task of translating social media presence into actionable knowledge about authority and influence, and sharing a lot of what they’re learning.