Make or break time for careers

Apr 16 2009 by Lewis Harrison, The Journal

WE'VE all heard tales of how making a virtual faux pas can seriously mess up your career.

It’s easily done, especially if you’re a little short on brain cells. You write a joking email slagging someone off then accidentally send it right to them. Post naked photographs of yourself for all to see. Or get busted for kerb crawling on Second Life. Tales of occupational suicide abound.

In the past week alone, two more plonkers have dug their own e-graves. First, there was the Downing Street adviser who had to resign after his childish emails about MPs were leaked. Then there was the Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, who got sacked for reviewing an illegal download of forthcoming movie, Wolverine.

But before you de-link from LinkedIn or cancel that Facebook account in blind panic, just hold on for a second. Because now a bunch of people with planet-sized brains are trying to tell us we ought to actually get closer to our bosses on social networking sites. Are they mad?

In collaboration with IBM, researchers at MIT’s Sloan School of Management have managed to attribute a monetary amount on the effect of electronic and virtual relationships between friends and colleagues.

According to their research (http://bit.ly/Axu7W), having a strong virtual connection to your boss – whether by email or social networking websites – brings more money into the business, and is on average worth an extra £365 in revenue per month over the norm.

By contrast, people with weaker connections to a number of managers produced £65 less in revenue than the norm.

So what can we learn from this? Well, it looks like you’re going to have to get a lot better at sucking up to your boss, for one thing.

There’s no reason why you should stop at your manager, though.

Through email and social media it’s so simple to connect virtually with people you might never have come across in the normal course of a day.

Good links with your boss might lead to a higher salary. Good links with others might lead to career opportunities or simply make it easier to do your job.

One word of warning. When you’re building virtual relationships, it’s important to keep your goals in mind and to remember that whilst technology makes it stupidly easy to communicate, it makes it even easier to be stupid.