Harnessing the Power of Your "Weak Ties"
In all the hand wringing and advice giving that surrounds the hot topic of social media, one thing often overlooked is that networks of connected people have a certain type of structure, and this network structure provides some clues for how to extract benefits from your own social network. Essentially, every person's network of contacts, colleagues, friends and associates (online or offline) is actually a small cluster within a much bigger network, which in turn is just a cluster within an even bigger network, and so forth. Because of this structure, the most useful positions aren't those with the most connections to other people, but those with the most connections to other clusters of people. Rather than the "strong ties" you have with your closest friends or your immediate co-workers, in other words, the robustness and usefulness of your own social network will be based more on the number of "weak ties" you also maintain - that is, ties to the people you don't know quite as well, or don't interact with quite as often. These are the people most likely to be connected to clusters you aren't familiar with and don't have access to yourself.
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