BTW, in another lifetime I worked on a magazine and since you are a writer I want to just point out that hone and home are often mixed because they sound alike,but hone means to sharpen, as a razor or skills, while home means to focus in on something. Just an fyi.

The important thing, I think, is to find and develop those close friendships. Even if you don’t have a lot of friends, life is so much richer with the ones you have. It’s worth risking some discomfort and embarrassment for.

With business contacts though…more might truly be better.

Excellent post! I will be buying this book.

Unfortunately, my family is in the habit of email exchanges that include the entire clan. So two people sparring over a political or religious issue is sent to the whole family, the respondent hits “reply all” and we’re off to the races. I hate to say it, but this means I ignore a good portion of my mother’s emails because of this. Once I figure out there is an electronic sparring match, I opt out, with a sigh.

This includes forwards, those “cute”, “sweet”, “touching” stories that get sent on and on, or the warnings, or the religious teachings tied up in a story with the warning at the end basically saying you don’t love God if you don’t forward it.

Such crap I find terribly annoying, and I will admit that I give a mental black mark to the sender. This might mean that when they want to send me something really important that I am predisposed to deleting their emails unread.

Such is the network jerk. They are verbal spam, except that it is difficult to find the delete key.

Online networking should have the same guidelines. Instead of racing towards 10000 followers on Twitter or getting a million friends on Facebook, why not effectively choose who you’d like to have a professional relationship with and cultivate it?

Its not hard to spot “online networking jerks”, and honestly they just clog up a lot of the useful networking sites that are out there.

I apologize that I have not read the book. Did the author give any tips for disengaging with one of the networking jerk/schmoozer types?

Lastly, I disagree with you on your very last point regarding the automatic responses. While I understand how you feel, there doesn’t seem to be another way for someone to let you what is happening. Sometimes I am faced with sending a work request to someone, and if I do not have the autoreply, I would be expecting a result. After the autoreply, I can ask someone else to do the task.

-Gen Y Investor

Funny about the like-attracting-like part, I married my social opposite. Where I loathe my lack of social skills (such irony for a gemini, surely) my husband has the gift to befriend just about anyone he pleases. Because of him, we’ve got friends who drive everything from 20 year old Nissan Silvias all the way up to a guy who has his own fleet of exotics. (Ferrari F430, Audi R8, Nissan GT-R for example, all his cars are black.) Slowly, I’m becoming more like him socially… But my shyness is definitely holding me back. Of course, I have had one or two victories that I can easily recall, instances where I have struck up conversation with strangers and it’s turned out okay.

One quick question — how would one initiate an exchange of contact info without coming off weird? Or is it not as weird as I think it is? I’ve often run into people who I want to get to know better or see again, but I never know how I’d go about exchanging phone numbers or email addresses or anything like that without sounding creepy.

I’m not normally a big fan of “fake it til you make it” strategies, but in regard to spreading your wings socially, it’s probably the only way. You have to get out and DO until you’re ready to BE.

Yeah, it’ll be kind of crappy if it isn’t your style, but the rewards are enormous.