Are you a Super Collector?

Terms such as Maven and Connector have passed into (almost) common usage since the popularity of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point.

Now, Bill Liao of openBC suggests a few more networking terms in his recent openBLOG posting "New lexicon for Social Software".

I particularly like the term Super Collector: "Someone who spends inordinate time connecting to people just for the sake of collecting them as a contact."

It's interesting as, for me, I recognise quite a few people who fit this description on openBC. I'll often get requests to connect with someone on openBC for no obvious reason. It really doesn't make sense on openBC, as the number of connections you have does not affect your networking "experience" (unlike LinkedIn where connections provide access and visibility across LinkedIn's 5 million + users)

I remember chatting to Julian Bond, Ecademy's CTO, last year and he felt that online networking was moving beyond just "collecting names".

The reality is that all the online networking platforms used viral marketing to grow rapidly. They all had ranking systems or built in mechanisms which encouraged people to invite their friends and connect to more people. Human nature is that, if you set the game up for someone to be #1, there will always be people motivated to go for it.

On openBC, you are ranked by country (your ranking is private to you) by the number of connections you have and number of successful invitations you've made. Once you do that, someone's always going to be motivated to connect to anyone, just so they can be "#1 in Albania".

Technorati Tags - Online Networking, openBC, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Tipping Point, Social Networking