Finding Personal Knowledge Management Contacts (Social Networking) Part 1

Finding Personal Knowledge Management Contacts (Social Networking) Part 1

1. MBWA – managing by walking around gives you the opportunity to develop contacts informally. These lower level workers can always become communication “linking pins in the future.
2. By becoming a member in professional groups, you can make contacts who are useful for providing ideas, and possibly other job opportunities.
3. If you take a college class, your contacts can range from the instructor to the other students, and each person in the class has his own PKM. By establishing trusting personal and professional relationships, PKM contacts may be sharable by mutual consent.
4. If you attend church, at least one member in each family has a job – and even retirees possess informal PKM capability.
5. If you are employed in a large company, formal meetings or training may introduce to possible contacts. As you move up the corporate ladder, these contacts will also mature over time to hold similar positions in their own departments or divisions. Contacts, like fine wine, only improve with age, and the trust you established long ago with these contacts continue.
6. Even jury duty provides you with possible contacts, although quite varied in value and nature. Opportunity is where you can find it.
7. Even belonging to IT vendor user groups can help make you better contacts, both within the IT profession and outside it. Because IT is so important to the entire organization’s productivity, proper contacts in this specialized area will become more important to you as your job opportunities progress.
8. Make further and more frequent contacts with people who are smarter or are more capable than you are. You will be forced to improve your own capabilities just keeping up with them. You may even learn from these contacts how to think outside the box.
9. E-mail contacts offers another kind of PKM matrix which did not exist twenty years ago. The importance of e-mail PKM matrices can be seen by the grants given by the government for the data mining e-mail contacts for national security purposes. Even if the e-mail is encrypted, the address of the sender and receiver are not.