What the Introductions Channel tells us about the future of Professional Networking
How online communities are redefining our professional experience
Work has fundamentally reshuffled in the last 12 months. While the debate continues about what version of normal we’ll return to, the delay has been enough for new infrastructure to emerge, habits to form, and cultural underpinnings to evolve. A critical part of work is professional networking - but not much is being said about how it will change in a post-pandemic world.
How It Used to Be
Consider the ways we networked a year ago: through the workplace, through local meetups, through local introductions, and through national conferences. I spent most of my professional life in Boulder where these behaviors were dialed to 11 as most startup companies are located within 6 blocks of each other. A notable portion of my week was spent running into folks at coffee shops, getting introductions to startup founders who were looking for advice, grabbing lunch with people who I wanted to learn from and dropping into Boulder Coffee Club, Boulder Beta, or Startup Week events.
None of that exists anymore.
So what is a professional to do, and how does one build a network in the modern, remote, post-pandemic age? Until recently, my professional networking had become about lobbing a Hail Mary message in LinkedIn or asking someone to make an email introduction. This strategy takes a lot of effort and has a lot of selection bias as to which introductions you end up getting.
Workarounds Become the Norm Especially in the Workplace
In the last year I have noticed my networking behavior changing, and I now firmly believe the future of professional networking is in online communities.
With no place for serendipitous networking in 2020 (which sometimes leads to the best professional connections) many of us started to spend more time in professional communities. All of a sudden I found myself regularly in professional Slack groups and more recently some Discord servers. In all cases, they have normed to include an introductions channel where participants share their relevant credentials (somewhat due to a lack of emphasis on profiles in these platforms). I find myself creeping through these channels to see who is there and watching closely to see who arrives.
This all reminds me of looking through the attendee list at a conference but without the part where you awkwardly wander around staring at people’s lanyards hoping to find someone interesting. Not only can I see who the person is and read a little about them, but I can slowly interact with them. An emoji reaction here - a reply to a comment there - warms people up hugely.
I thank Twitter for being an incredible training ground for the slow performative way we meet strangers online now. It translates even better in professional communities as we have 10x the context to work with. In only a few message exchanges I feel comfortable reaching out and DMing someone in a community. I find that I have an insane connection rate versus LinkedIn. We’re talking maybe 95% versus 15%.
In the last 6 months, over 80% of my new professional connections have come from this methodology and I only see that increasing. What’s interesting is that this isn’t a built in feature of either Slack or Discord. It’s a total hacky workaround that has become part of Slack-style chat group culture.
What Are the Problems?
The problem for a generation of professionals moving online is that Slack and Discord don’t go far enough to embrace this behavior. Some examples:
Context - Slack has no larger context to it. Each Slack group is a silo with no shared profiles, information, or DMs. Sometimes your Slack spans a few accounts based on what email you used for the group. There is no community, no follow, no ability to experience someone in Slack in a broader professional context. That’s because the assumption is you already have it as the design assumes everyone is your co-worker. For the most part, Slack introductions just spill over to Twitter as a broader way to follow someone. This has its pros and cons. Conversely, Discord has a broader community where you have a central profile but there is no broader community functionality to engage with.
Profiles - Both applications have poor profiles for different reasons. In Slack, you have to rebuild your profile for each group you’re in. Some might call this a feature but I believe it’s a deeply flawed bug in their design. In addition, most user’s context is that they are in a company where many of the people know each other. Why fill out a profile which will only be read by your co-workers? Discord comes from casual and anonymous gaming roots where you don’t care that much who people are as long as they are fun to play games with.
Model - Both Slack and Discord are incredible because they provide their product for free to millions of users. But very quickly the context in which they were created becomes their limitation. Slack is fundamentally a product designed for co-workers but paid for by the companies they work for. Every community I have been in that builds on Slack hits a moment where they lose their message history or are faced with paying for it and it slowly inverts to becoming untenable as a solution. In addition, there is effectively no discovery for Slack groups so communities are left to build on their own. Discord conversely has a broader appeal with built in discovery but can’t seem to shake its gamer origins. The casual avatar-based anonymity of Discord does little to create the feeling of a serious environment for work-related conversations to transpire.
Rented vs Owned - The future of being a community creator is being able to own them. The rent versus own debate has many shades but will become a central theme in how platforms are built in the next few years. Discord is a rented space which is a major downside for community builders.
On a brighter note, obviously things are working somewhat if my behavior is changing. But in the startup world, workarounds forced on millions of people tend to not last very long.
Who Really Needs this To Work Better?
Fairly soon, some of us will head back into the office at least part time and some of the mechanisms for professional networking will come back with that. But there is a massively growing group of professionals where the new form of professional networking will always be the case: influencers and creators. Influencers and creators don’t have an office to return to, work remotely, and are digitally native to these types of chat-based communities. I firmly believe they bring a subtle but unique third context to online communities - a blend of professional and casual. They not only want advanced tools to collaborate with their peers but also need free and casual spaces to socialize. Work is inherently social to them. They are community builders at heart and the community tools they use need to empower them to do so, not constrain them with artificial limitations meant to drive revenue. The massive rise in creators and the fact that they are all freelancers by definition (at least in their side hustles) will bring these issues to the foreground. As this group of professionals approaches 50 million worldwide, we’re already seeing products being built for them specifically.
The Bigger Picture
In the coming months you’ll be hearing a lot more about this from us. For now, I encourage you to join a few creator communities and see if your behaviors change as well. Send me your thoughts at nielr@influence.co.
-Niel