It’s not for me, but there’s a certain unerring logic about SocialMinder: instead of leaving your social and business relationships to be tended by natural forces, why not automate them?
SocialMinder offers just that, by mining your LinkedIn and Gmail address books and notifying you when you last contacted that person. (This is called monitoring the health of your relationships.) It not only does that; it will dig out some news item related to the person in question—or from the organisation they work for, and prepare an email for you. Something like this:
which reads:
Hi Wicak;
I was thinking about you the other day, and then I saw this and had to ask how/if this impacts you..
ACES Int'l Certification Programs: Certified Utility Locator …
Here is the link:
http://www.acesinternational.org/Hope that you all are well…
Talk with you soon…
Needless to say, should I send this to Wicak he would be highly surprised as that’s not the way I talk to him (not enough insults and expletives), and the fact I’m pointing out his organisation’s own website to him might give him pause to wonder whether continuing our friendship is a good idea.
Some early thoughts:
This kind of thing occupies an odd space in the social/business networking pantheon. On the one hand, we all know there’s a lot of dodginess about networking. It’s all about back-scratching, and what-can-you-do-for-me about it all. But it still needs to be civil, and at least a pretence maintained that there’s more to it than naked mutual exploitation (actually, put like that it sounds quite fun.)
So how to monitor and nurture those relationships without putting in the effort that real relationships require? Hence SocialMinder (I suspect a better name would be SocialMiner without the ‘d’.) It’s pretty well executed, of course, and perhaps there are instances where this kind of approach might be useful.
But all SocialMinder really does is to remind you that relationships aren’t about quantity, they’re about quality. Even business ones.
Everyone on LinkedIn knows—I assume—that they’re on there because they want to make use of other people’s networks. These networks, actually, don’t really exist. They’re just a bunch of names, loosely tied, as Mr Weinberger might put it. It’s not that LinkedIn is not useful, but it’s not because we’re constantly sending our LInkedIn buddies emails about their company’s activities. It’s because we can use those loose connections to hear about jobs, or put out requests, knowing that it’s going to people who accept such emails as part of the networking process. Call it a kind of ‘business spam opting in’.
So, sadly, I don’t think SocialMinder will catch on. Indeed, you might argue it marks the apogee of the social networking trend. If we need to rely on software to direct our relationships then, I suspect, we’ve either entered another dimension from which there’s no turning back, or we’ll realise the limits of the medium and start to focus on the people behind the nodes.