A Little Help from Your Friends

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Ah, love -- digital style. You no doubt know of Friendster, the online social networking Web site. In only a year, the service has gained cult status, particularly among the 20-something set, by capitalizing on two ideas: first, that everyone in the world is connected by no more than six degrees of separation, and second, that the best romantic matches are the ones we find through our friends. On Friendster, members post profiles on the Web and invite their friends to post profiles, too. As people invite more friends to join, they can see the exponential growth of their networks -- and can directly contact those friends of friends. Members can provide testimonials affirming their friends' date-ability and can suggest matches of people who might want to go out on a date. The site is addictive -- it claimed more than 6 million users in early March and spawned a new pick-up line: "Are you on Friendster?"

If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We're not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers. As in love, the best business links often come through people you know: The best hires are usually referrals, and the best way to get in the door for a sales call is through an introduction from a mutual friend. Until now, however, we've been limited to calling on people in our immediate circle. Social networking software offers the tantalizing opportunity to reach out not just to folks in your own little black book, but also to the friends and associates of all those people (as well as their friends and associates).

Looking for a new job? Post your profile, search your network for contacts, and ask those friends of friends of friends to help you find a match. Need an introduction to a venture capitalist? Get that colleague's former college roommate to hook you up. It's a tantalizing notion: Play this game right, and the dreaded cold call becomes obsolete.

It could work out that way for Keith Furuya, a 39-year-old financial advisor for MetLife in Silicon Valley. He estimates that about 30 of his 50 high net worth clients have come his way thanks to introductions through a web-based networking service called Spoke. An old business-school classmate of Spoke CEO Ben T. Smith's, Furuya was intrigued when Smith invited him to sign up the with service 18 months ago. "I've always been a big networker, and when I look at my Rolodex I have over 1,000 names in there," he says. "But I didn't know who knows who or how those thousand people could help me get to new clients."

On the Spoke Web site, Furuya filled out a simple personal profile -- name, title, company, contact information -- and clicked a button marked "build network" which downloaded a program from Spoke that mined his Outlook email and contact database for information about who he knows and how frequently he maintains contact with them. In a few minutes, Furuya's new, online "Spoke book'" was populated not only with the thousand contacts he had manually entered into his Outlook contacts list, but also with everyone he'd ever exchanged email with from that email account. Spoke also rated the strength of these relationships based on how often and how recently he had emailed with each person, as well as whether he was the only recipient of a message or was simply part of a larger distribution list.