The Ethics of Networking

A question came up the other day about some of the social networking sites that are specifically geared toward business connections, and I thought it might be worth taking a closer look. Most people are aware of some form of social networking site by now (if you’re not, you probably wouldn’t be reading web logs, either), and most business people either use one of the general-purpose services to which they subscribe to make business contacts (and gain information about people and companies), or else join one of the services that have been set up for that specific purpose. As is the case with most social networking systems, your status within the network (and the amount of utility your membership will bring you) depend mostly on how many people you are connected to, both directly and at one or more degrees of separation. This in turn means that most really serious users will spend most of their time asking anyone they encounter (in the real world or online) for permission to link to them – which raises the question of what responsibility you have to the rest of your network…

When you accept a “friend request” or the equivalent on a purely social network, all you are saying is that you know the requestor – or that someone you know might have done so at some point and you didn’t want to be rude. No endorsement of that person is either made or implied; you can’t possibly vouch for thousands of people (the so-called “monkeysphere” research suggests that you can’t really know more than a hundred or two people in the first place), and certainly no one would expect you to. But in a business setting anyone you associate with (even very casually) is assumed to be someone with whom you have a business relationship, be it vendor, customer, partner or competitor – which is to say, businesses don’t just “hang out” together, and it’s assumed that anyone you just “hang out” with is a personal, rather than business, connection. The problem is that you may not always feel comfortable about people making that assumption…

In any large organization of which you have ever been a part, there will have been people you respect and admire, people whom you utterly despise, and a large majority of people about whom you have no strong feelings whatsoever. If you grant a friend request to any of these people, however, there is a non-zero chance that anyone seeing the connection in your network (or theirs) will assume that you approve of this individual, and in fact that this is an informed choice you have made based on your knowledge of this person. If it’s one of the people you actually respect and/or admire, this might be correct, but if it’s someone from either of the other two categories, there could be real trouble for you in the future…

By the same token, anyone who makes such a request of you is (by definition) also offering you a reciprocal link, and stating unequivocally that they consider you to be worth of such a connection. Unless your own network is extremely large (e.g. it already includes everyone in the other person’s network) you will probably stand to gain something from this exchange of favors, and as such, it would be both unwise and rude to decline the offer – unless you have some reason to be dubious about the person making the request. You certainly wouldn’t add anyone to your personal social network who you knew to be a criminal, a predator, or an incompetent; it would reflect badly on you and it might expose the other people in your network to harm. So I have to ask: do you have any responsibility to the people in your business connections network to ensure that any new addition to your network is worthy of being there? Or can you safely assume that everyone online knows that no guarantee or warranty is created by extending or accepting a contact, and that they will make their own judgments about everyone connected to you?

It’s worth thinking about…