I have a profile on just about every social network that I can find.  That doesn't mean I use all of them, of course, but I am starting to run into a very interesting problem that I have to assume others are running into as well.  The problem is keeping my social network synchronized.  I have nearly 250 contacts on LinkedIn, and nearly 100 on Facebook, and they are different.  I know most of those people have accounts on both, but if I am already connected to someone, it requires an extra step to connect again on another site ... which I don't take/have the time to do. 

Add to that the fact that now I have over 4000 folks who subscribe to this feed, but I am only connected to most of them through the fact that they read this blog on occasion and not through any social networks.  So you can probably guess where this idea is heading.  What if there was a universal button that I could just put on my blog to let someone connect to me?  Period.  And that button would let them send me an invite for LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and whatever other network I choose to set up.  Then I could review the invitations individually and approve or decline them.  The only argument against this that I could see is if you want to keep your communities separate (for example use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for personal contacts).  Still, under this idea you could still choose to only approve certain types of invitations.  What do you think - would this work?

About the Idea Bar:  Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas.  We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client.  They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing.  Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them.  Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.

Rohit Bhargava

This piece was originally published on Rohit's blog, Influential Marketing, and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. Rohit's bio can be viewed here.

Flickr Image  By candrews