Why You Must Rethink How You Build Relationships In The 21st Century
“The digitization of relationships has fundamentally changed what it means to build a network in the 21st century.” Network literacy is now a requirement in order to succeed in the modern world. This skill set helps individuals and businesses build their networks. In a world where an abundance of information is trafficked through the web day in and day out, relationship building has never been more accessible. The correlation between relationship building and networking is stronger than ever.
By building a relationship, networking is inherently established. It can be said, however, that relationship building “represents the opposite values of traditional networking.” With the introduction of social media sites, smartphones, etc., communication continues to grow digitally. Communication is what forms relationships. This digital communication allows individual people to connect with any company across every industry at any time or place. As a result, relationships are built, creating social networks among people that may have never had the chance to create a relationship otherwise.
What is becoming more key to networking in the modern day is building a value system that is more social and less transactional. “As the worlds between personal and professional blend, building friendships professionally means treating people more like friends and less like contacts.” As presented in the article, analogies between traditional networking and relationship building can be made:
The ideas presented in this article relate to the course in several ways. The premise that traditional networking is changing implies that networking algorithms should parse current network chains to incorporate relationship strength. Relationship strength can dictate the reach of one person’s ability to network with contacts associated with the people already withing his/her network.