About a month ago LinkedIn (site, my profile) launched visualizations: the ability to see your connections graphed visually.
Once you’ve labled your connections and assigned a color to them, you can very quickly see where your network is strong and heavily linked, and where you have “outlier” connections … people that you’re connected to via only one path.
Here’s my professional network visualization, zoomed out:
It’s pretty clear that a LOT of my connections are with people who work or have worked at Premier, Franklin Covey, or School Specialty … since I spent 15 years in basically the same organization (Premier) as it went through two acquisitions (Franklin Covey, and then School Specialty). And Intel and Intel partners is big: I spent a lot of time working with those companies over the past few years.
Beyond those two … it’s a mix of blogging and social media contacts, friends, agency contacts, and recruiters. Canpages is pretty new yet – I’ve only been in my new role for about 5 months – but is starting to come along.
Here’s a little closer view:
