Networking in a World without (5) Stars

Quick test of your social network’s value: If you lost all access to the internet and your roof started leaking, how long would it take you to find someone to repair it temporarily? how long to fix it properly?

Over the holidays, we got our first ⛈️ BIG STORM ⛈️ of the season here in California. The huge waves battering the coastline grabbed headlines with sensational images of surf crashing into businesses and sneaker waves wreaking havoc on beachgoers.

What didn’t make the headlines was the crisis of suddenly discovered leaking roofs across the Bay Area, en masse. There was so much wind and water in such a short time that soggy homeowners were confronted with an urgent need for repairs.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

So, they did what any self-respecting homeowner would do these days: search the internet for roof repairers. And, in this crisis, they were thrown right into the wild world of Top 10s and sponsored ads that floods any search engine query on “roof repair near me”:

Why is this method such a mess? We’ve off-loaded our social networks' referral and recommendation responsibilities to the major (and minor) search engines in the order of billions of dollars of value (see Quick Hits below). Instead of maintaining social contacts with people who know people, we’ve let recommendation platforms (Yelp, Angi, etc) carry the load for us. We’ve swapped trusted friends for five-star ratings with little understanding of who’s giving those stars away.

These recommendation risks are tolerable when you’re ordering a burrito, but not when it comes to repairing your most expensive asset.

So, what makes it a crisis? Those who’ve gamed the system to land choice 5-star reviews and high slots on pay-for-placement lists are quickly overwhelmed when demand is high. And the quality of their work suffers accordingly. Either the homeowner gets added to “the list of jobs” for attention weeks (or months) later, or the homeowner starts resorting to contacting listings that have poor reviews (primarily for good reason) in hopes of getting immediate help. It's a less-than-ideal solution, for sure.

Good old-fashioned, analog social network to the rescue. In every crisis we hear it happen: someone in need has a contact with a friend of a friend, or the in-law of a friend who knows somebody who can help. Bingo. Thanks to the weak ties in social networks, we can find someone dependable who will fix the leak or, even better, get our name to the top of the list of jobs to be done by a reputable outfit.

No five-star reviews are needed to vet the solution; the implicit endorsement of our connection lends credibility. Better still, depending on the reputation of the connection, the solution may come faster and cheaper than without the connection.

Just How Robust is Your Network?

Your turn to take stock: How much of the overhead of referrals and recommendations have you off-loaded to search engines and review platforms? Here’s a thought experiment to help you figure it out:

If you lost access to all search engines and recommendation platforms, who in your network would you contact to ask for the following referrals?

• Classy yet affordable restaurant for a small group gathering

• Charismatic math tutor for your child/relative

• Social marketing support for an upcoming event

• Skilled in-home care for an unwell relative

• Trustworthy mechanic to fix your out-of-warranty automobile

If the same person’s name comes up for all of the above situations, you’ve struck gold🥇with this connection. Buy them a bottle of wine tomorrow to thank them “just because.” Keep this connection strong. Never get on this person’s wrong side!

But if you’re like most of us, you have two or three referrals covered but need help to cover the rest.

Luckily, there are at least two solutions to filling the hole: 1) actively seek out someone new in the domain to add to your network or 2) ask around your current contacts to uncover who already has the information and you just didn’t know it.

Either way, you’ve got work to do on your network, before the urgency of the ask hits hard.

Plumber Martin via GIPHY

This Week’s Quick Hits

• Only 13% of Americans resolved to improve relationships with friends or family in 2024 in a December 2023 YouGov poll. (Top of list: 23% want to save more money).

• Where the Big Tech Companies make their billions, visualized.

• If you want a question answered on the internet, post a wrong answer first.

I have 2 stackoverflow accounts. Whenever I want a good thorough answer, I post the question then login to the other account and reply with a wrong answer. Always end up getting 3-5 perfect answers correcting my fake answer

— omar (@awkroot) April 9, 2022

That’s all for this week! See you next Thursday.

— Thomas