Networking for Knowledge...

I have a personal CRM strategy (see here). Critical to that approach is clean data (so I can do things like this and this), which is why I like Plaxo, for example.

As a result, I spend a lot of time pruning my Outlook contacts list. It's time consuming, but worth it.

But, today, I realized that, potentially, Facebook (Friend me on Facebook) may become the platform for Personal Relationship Management because of the way I will soon be able to quickly pinpoint a large group of people for information dispersion (say all of my friends who lived in Japan with me and like Rudy Giuliani, for example).

That's extremely powerful for communication, but what about the knowledge aggregation component?

Well, this week, (motivated further by Book Review: Never Eat Alone ) I've been testing that out. As you know, I am a huge fan of LinkedIn (see why here), and I took advantage of a feature called "Answers" where you can put questions out to your network (and their network!) which is exactly what I did for a challenging marketing problem I am facing at work (For background:
Marketing Challenge: Microsoft in Web 2.0?).

Well, not only have I received some GREAT answers, but I've made NEW contacts as well.

And while this was top of mind from me, I received this brilliant video forwarded to me about a service (www.carmun.com) that essentially tries to bring Facebook and LinkedIn Answers (they cite Wikipedia) together-mostly focused, at least initially on college students.

It just keeps getting better.