Joe Bartling of Spiderware.com responded to the last post about how to brainstorm the email address of someone you do not know in a company:

"Using this is like carpetbombing leaflets without regard for the environment below, otherwise known as SP-MMING. I've found that a more effective way of finding out someone's email address is to search Google for the domain name and mailto, such as "mailto abc.com". The search results will usually respond with email addresses of how the company address mail, such as john.doe@abc.com or jdoe@abc.com. Using the spreadsheet and bombarding emails to knowingly wrong addresses is just plain SP-M."

Responding to Joe's comments:

As Alex Monty suggested, the best way to handle the ambiguous email is to send one email to jsmith@xyz.com, and then in the BCC box put in johnsmith@xyz.com; john_smith@xyz.com; etc. That way the recipient only sees one email in his/her inbox, and you cannot be accused of sp-mming.

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VentureBlog: Practical Networking: Make Your Own Luck: some useful thoughts on meeting people the old fashioned way, in person.

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Alex Monty of Strategic Sourcing LLC has created a no-cost spreadsheet which generates all possible email addresses for a person, once you enter that person's full name and corporate URL. This is useful when you want to email someone but do not know his/her email address.

Download here:
http://www.strategicsourcingllc.us/useless.htm

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More thoughts from the research I'm doing for my book on structural holes and closed networks:

In some cases, you can benefit by being in a highly interconnected network, one in which there are virtually no structural holes . This is a "closed network", “in which everyone is connected such that no one can escape the notice of the others".

A naturally occurring example of a closed network is a family. Anyone in a large family benefits from being in a high-strength and highly interconnected network. The Kennedy, Bush, and Gore political dynasties are excellent examples in the USA. Any aspiring politician from those families has a huge head start over someone from a less prominent family.

Another powerful example is a business school section. At many leading business schools, students are grouped into a section of perhaps 80 students and take many classes together. As a result, they spend a great deal of time together and get to know one another well. This is a very powerful club to join. Precisely because the section is so interconnected, the members trust and support one another.

There are two benefits of membership in a closed network:

+ Improves access to information. Remember the children’s game of “Telephone"? Information deteriorates in quality the more steps it has to pass through. In a closed network, you have multiple ways to get access to the same information, so it is more likely that you will get accurate information. The members of a small fraternity all know a lot of accurate information about one another’s activities.

+ Closed networks make it easier to reward and punish people, which in turn makes it less risky to trust other members. The common group membership provide a check. You are not too likely to rip off another member of your business school section in a business deal, because that abuse will hurt your relationships with the others. The group as a whole can also reward and punish outsiders.

For example, let us say that Ikenna runs a three-person consulting firm, and Neena runs a food delivery business. If Neena provides bad service to Ikenna, she will get no further business from Ikenna, and she will also get no further business from any of Ikenna’s colleagues. Similarly, if she provides excellent service, it is likely that Ikenna will influence his colleagues, or perhaps even hire Neena to cater an event for the firm.

The larger Ikenna’s company, the more motivation Neena has to treat Ikenna well. However, a large organization cannot be a closed network, and so it is more difficult to create consequences for outsiders. If Ikenna works for a huge company like GE, then Neena can provide bad food to him, without hurting her sales of food to another GE office. And good service to GE’s CEO will likely have little influence on catering purchases throughout GE.

Closed networks also exist within open networks; people call them cliques. If Ikenna works in a small department with five other people, that is a closed network. If Neena sells bad food to this department, the consequences for her will be the same as if she sold bad food to a small consulting firm.

The implication for you: it is often advisable to join a formal, small group in which you can get to know everyone. If you are not lucky enough to be born into a large and high-powered family, and not fortunate enough to marry into one, creating such a high-strength network requires a significant amount of time. However, it is well worth the investment.

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HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: Leveraging Your Team's Interpersonal Skills:

What does it really mean to be good with people? This Harvard Business Review excerpt examines the "relational" aspect of business.

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As many of you know, I am in the final stages of writing a book on building quality business relationships online. Details are at Online Business Networks.com. Occasionally I will blog here some of my research and thoughts on this topic, drawing on my work for the book. I welcome your feedback on any of the material that I post.

Some thoughts on structural holes in your business relationships:



You will usually benefit if the members of your network do not know one another. Ronald Burt, in his innovative and influential book, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, provides fascinating support for the argument that both people and companies benefit by sitting in a “structural hole" of a network. A structural hole exists when there is only a weak connection between two clusters of densely connected people.

For example, let us say you are the head of German country sales for Hasbro, Inc., a major manufacturer of games and toys. Your value to Hasbro is as a pipeline to the German market. It is in your interest to build relationships with many people in both Hasbro headquarters and in the German market. You fill a structural hole between those two groups. In order to preserve that structural hole, we recommend you should probably not introduce the two pools of people (the American Hasbro toy-sellers and the German toy-buyers).

Structural holes can generate two types of benefits, control benefits and information benefits:

• Control benefits: By sitting between two groups who both need you, you have control over them. Your salary is your payment for brokering the relationship. For example, your clients in Germany need you to push Hasbro for extra shipments of a hot new toy for Christmas. Because the German retailers need the benefits of your influence, they will compensate you, perhaps by placing a larger order with you next month.

• Information benefits: You have superior information because of your privileged position. You have better information about the German market than your colleagues at Hasbro US, who do not speak German and do not have many relationships in Germany. That information is part of your value to Hasbro.

If you introduce your clients to your boss, you are much more dispensable. Your boss can readily terminate you, and then replace you either himself or with another, cheaper person. You have destroyed the structural hole.

You also currently have ties with both Hans and with Franz, two colleagues in the Buyers department at Wal-Mart Germany. Hans and Franz work closely together and lift weights together five times a week.

We recommend that you focus on building strong ties with just Hans or just Franz, and not spend too much time building ties with the other person. We believe that the control and information benefits you can get from Hans and Franz are redundant, for two reasons.

• Hans and Franz are structurally equivalent, i.e., they fill a virtually identical role within Wal-Mart Germany. They have the same job and interact with the same people all day. Simply because of their identical role, they have access to the same information as one another.

• Hans and Franz are highly cohesive; i.e., they spend a lot of time together and constantly talk and share ideas. Because of that, anything one knows, the other probably knows also.

For both of these reasons, Hans is likely going to provide you virtually the same sort of information as Franz, and vice versa. If you spend time building relationships with both of them, you are not going to sell twice as many games and toys. Given that you only have bandwidth for a limited number of relationships, you should focus on just Hans or just Franz. Sell to that one person.

Instead of spending lots of time with Hans and Franz, we recommend instead that you spend more time selling to (for example) Karstadt, another top European department store group.

Let us say that you offer Wal-Mart a more attractive deal than you do Karstadt. However, you can only do that if the two companies have a structural hole between them. If Hans quits his job and goes to Karstadt, he will likely stay in touch with his old weightlifting buddy Franz. You will then have less negotiating power versus Karstadt, because Hans will know all about the extra-low prices that you gave Wal-Mart.

Because Hans and Franz are closely tied to one another, the structural hole between Wal-Mart and Karstadt has disappeared. You are now in a much weaker negotiating position.

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Rob Cross, whom I met at the KM Forum a few months ago, has just released (through Harvard Business School Press) his new book, "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" (coauthored with Andrew Parker). You can download from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Newsletter an excerpt on why social network analysis reveals How Org Charts Lie.

I think the book is excellent: well researched (unlike most books on 'networking') and full of useful ideas. It will likely motivate you to employ social network analysis in your own organization (which Rob and his coauthor Andrew Parker are happy to provide).

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CareerJournal: Effective Leaders Follow These Eight Practices

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Ask These 10 Questions Before Taking a Job

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A New Strategy for Venture Investors: Hedge - Knowledge@Wharton

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How to Calculate Lifetime Customer Value

See http://www.clickz.com/experts/crm/analyze_data/article.php/3359611 for background, and
http://www.zeromillion.com/excel/lifetime-value-profit.xls for a very detailed calculator.

courtesy of Jeremy Kagan

Jeremy Kagan is a New York City-based entrepreneur and consultant to media and technology companies. With a BA from The Wharton School and MBA from Columbia University, Mr. Kagan currently works with HITN-TV, a leading Spanish language cable channel, and recent projects include work with Interactive Corp., a leading insurance brokerage, and other clients. Kagan produces weekly live music events through his music marketing and event promotion company. Kagan is also an Adjunct Professor at Metropolitan College where he teaches classes in Interactive Business and Entrepreneurship for the Media MBA program.

jeremykagan2000@yahoo.com

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I thought that some of you on the list may be interested in taking on a
new job. A number of my clients are seeking to hire people with
backgrounds in sales, finance, creative/graphic arts, advertising, HR, and in some other
sectors. All openings are posted at http://www.teten.com/Jobs.htm . All of the openings are in either New York or India.

Also, my company, Nitron Advisors, is seeking Manhattan office
space. I welcome any suggestions you might have.


Preferred location: midtown
Need: room for 5-10 people, ideally with easy option to add new staff
and take additional room
Preferred situation: sublet from an established firm
Business background: Nitron Advisors is an independent research firm
which provides institutional investors (mainly hedge funds) with access
to frontline industry experts. For more information, please see
www.nitronadvisors.com .


If you know of a suitable space, please contact David Teten,
david.teten @ nitronadvisors.com, [1] 212-838-9869 . Please, no broker phone calls.

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