The Watercooler

Commenting on Nicky Kriel’s post of 27th May, I said that I was surprised how often I came across people in the Twitter world who knew other people I knew. Of course, this is the very essence of networking. Think about the word ‘networking’. Now visualise a fishing net. Each knotted joint represents a person. From your knot you are linked to other knots that are linked to still more knots and so on. Trying to catch fish is a lot easier if there are a large number of knots, hence a larger net.

Of course, we want to catch the right type of fish, so we need to structure the net accordingly. If we do business in our local area only, it isn’t helpful to spend time building an international net.

But before you set off for a day’s fishing, maybe ‘networking’ literally means working the nets, maybe even making them in the first place. Perhaps its original meaning was akin to teamwork. Which is a bit like co-working and Jelly gatherings.

Hmm, just cast a Twitter net for my local town. Think I’d want to throw back most of the fish caught in it!