Written By Eric Alpin

No matter how long you have been a part of a social networking website, one of the toughest tasks is actually maintaining your network.  No, I’m not talking about adding and deleting friends, followers, or connections.  I’m referring to staying connected with the people in your social network.

Far too often, we approve a connection or friend and we don’t do anything.  They become just another number to us.  The key to social networking is not having the most friends or followers; it’s about building relationships and maintaining connections.

Maintaining your social network can be quite beneficial.  First, you never know who will need a hand down the road.  When you connect with people, they may come to you with problems questions.  If you choose to help them out, you will demonstrate your relationship is valuable.  Also, you might develop partnerships that could influence your future.  Staying connected with Billy or Sally could lead you to a good friend, business partner, or even mate.

So, how do you stay connected with your social network?

Step 1:  Assess Your Connections

The first step in maintaining your social network is to assess your current connections.  In order to maintain your network, you need to know what connections you already have.  If you have ever fallen into the “tons-of-friends” trap, you might not know who you are connected to.  Take a quick browse through your friends list, followers, or connections.  It might be helpful to write down or type out any key connections you want to maintain.

Step 2:  How You Will Stay Connected

This is probably the hardest step in the process.  Deciding how you will stay connected with a person can be tricky.  There are many things to consider, such as public or private conversation, time, and word choice.  If you don’t mind other people seeing your conversation, or if you will be making casual conversation, a comment or direct tweet probably would suffice.  However, if you’re going to go in-depth about relationships and careers, you might want to stay connected with a private message.  Also, remember that connections take time.  Whether it is just one sentence or 15, it will still take time to formulate and send.

Step 3:  Plan of Attack

After determining how you will stay connected, you will need to develop a plan of attack.  It wouldn’t be a smart idea to take five hours of your day to comment or message each one of your friends or followers.  That could get quite messy.  Develop a manageable plan for maintaining your connections.  For example, if you have 50 people you will connect with, comment or message two of them each day for 25 days.  This will be less stressful for you and less of a load on your networking profile.

Step 4:  Keep Them Up!

The final step in maintaining your network is to keep up with your connections.  Don’t let the people you connect with fall by the wayside.  Don’t worry – it is necessary to comment or direct message someone once a week to maintain the connection.  Maybe you decide once a month or once a quarter is good.  However, do not connect with someone simply because you need something.  This does not make you look good and does not help your relationship.

Keeping up with your connections is a crucial part of social networking.  In fact, it’s the reason why social networking websites were developed.  All in all, maintaining your network will allow for you to build better relationships with your friends, followers, and connections, and you never know how those relationships will play out…

Eric Alpin is a social media enthusiast, blogger, creative genius, and avid reader. Eric enjoys maintaining his website, ericalpin.com, editing and shooting video, reading, hanging out with his friends and girlfriend, and playing sports. Eric works full-time for a telecommunications company in the Baltimore, Md. area and is currently seeking his Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Studies. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

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Written By: Chris Brogan

This post is somewhat inspired by a thought Jeff Pulver tossed out as an aside at his Social Media Jungle prototype in Long Island a few weeks ago. Hat tip to you, Jeff.

Jeff Pulver said this: “We’re making our own dial tone.” In such a typical Jeff Pulver way, he tossed out a little idea that had been bouncing around his head, but that he hasn’t rolled into any particular context yet, so I’m going to run with it. I’ve got an idea that came to me tonight about Twitter (amongst other social networks), and I’m going to share it with you: take that dial tone idea and build your own network. We’re sitting on something because we’re still in the “gee whiz” mode. Let me explain.

Where We Falter – Solo Efforts Versus Scale

I asked Twitter tonight about what people were working on for goals. Several people had remarkably similar goals, including, sadly, the fact that several of them were looking for work. 2008 is the easy year compared to what 2009 is going to be. I saw the same thing passing through everyone’s stream, and I saw connectivity that would be missed. And that’s when it stuck me. I tweeted this:

Do you realize there are thousands of great minds all plugged into the same conversation who could help each other with your goals? Activate

The trick is this- don’t make me or anyone the hub. Lead. Find your groups. Reach out. Set group goals. Execute. Move to a new group. Fluid.

You see, you’re all out there. You’ve got goals, you’ve got needs, you’ve got sources of information, and you have the tools to connect it all. You’ve got every piece of a network except for the directors.

So, what if you had the templates to building a small but powerful network? Here’s my starting ideas on this. I’ll talk in somewhat technical terms, but I promise this has everything to do with the human elements. I hope it sparks something in you. More so, I hope you run with it.

Build a Small Powerful Network

1. First, think about your goals in 2009. Build the network with two purposes on mind: how you can achieve your goals, and how you can help others achieve theirs.
2. You need authentication in a network. Start with a blog as a home base. Make it such that your about page tells people lots about you.
3. It doesn’t hurt to have a picture of YOU on the blog, as this will deal with building a trusted network.
4. Start a Google Doc spreadsheet with the following fields: name, twitter ID, cell, capabilities, notes. Think of this as your routing table, your database of records of where resources reside.
5. Ask some probing questions on Twitter. If no one responds, ask again. See if there’s interest out there. What you’re doing at this point is sending out a signal that you’re looking for resources. (Like a computer, only you’re human.)
6. Use Twitter Search to find some like-minded people. Work at this. Try all different kinds of queries until you find the right response.
7. Send @ messages to these types of people. Ask them if they want to talk about collaborating.
8. Invite them to your document, if you want. Let them share the resources. Get them into the mix.
9. From here, collaborate. Figure out how you can helpful. Understand each other’s needs, and share the resources. Try to build your goals and businesses together.

It’s not exactly simple. But to me, it’s all there. You build the mechanisms (very simple ones), and you go after the goals together. You can feed it. You can encourage the edge points of the network (the other people) to be their own hub. You can build out more capabilities.

Scribbles from The Sidebar

What if you thought of these small networks in terms of games? Games have goals. They have a point. What if you set goals and points to these networks? What if you went at this network-building and empowerment as something very active, instead of using tools like Twitter as another place to chat?

In 2009, you need your networks. It is not a solo act. I need mine, too. And I plan to do exactly what I’ve laid out here.

Does it make sense? Can you see this as a template for how you might start getting your goals met for 2009? Are you planning to ally and make new relationships? What do you think?

Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at [chrisbrogan.com], a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati.

This post was originally published on [Chrisbrogan.com] and is republished with permission.

Photo credit, Jared