Connections matter. Relationships matter. Whether you are in sales, marketing, or building your own business as an entrepreneur, you are all in the same boat. Some are you are better connected than others. Some of you jumped on the social web bandwagon years ago, and there are still some of you who still do not have a LinkedIn profile.
All of us count on our connections and relationships to grow and prosper. There are many helpful web tools that consolidate all of your connections and contacts and show them to you in a list format. Your Outlook contact list, your email subscription list, Gist, or even your Contact list from LinkedIn or Twitter. Nice to have and up till now, the only way to get value out of the list was to sort and resort the list based on the desired criteria.
Your list might look something like this:
The challenge with this method is that you need to figure out how to use this raw data to identify the best, most likely connection path for your purpose.
Your answer is PeopleMaps.
This web tool presents your connections and social web activity information to you in an entirely new way. The brilliance of PeopleMaps is that it takes the same data and presents it to me visually, showing me the connections between us all. When I see this data laid out visually, it immediately becomes clear. The paths and connections are right there on the screen. No ambiguity or confusion now. Here is what I am talking about:
From this ConnectionPaths map within PeopleMaps, I get a much clearer, deeper and faster understanding of who can help me get an audience with Jeff. The connection path in red has been identified as the most likely “best” path to connect based on data from my social web activity, and in this case it is correct. I have much more activity with Michael Damphousse than with the others. There is a popout legend that helps you identify the types of connections, roles, companies, schools and more, all in a visual way.
Legend for PeopleMaps ConnectionPaths view:
If you want to immediately know more about any connection on the screen, simply put your mouse over the connection or icon and you will see more detail and drill-down capability as shown here: 
You are now able to find out how you are connected to any person or any company. I am frequently surprised with the results when I type in a name that I want to connect with. It has shown me the value of a large social web presence and how it can be used for an important business purpose. PeopleMaps is a visualization tool. In order to best grasp it’s power and capability, you must see it in action. The team at PeopleMaps will be participating in our Web Tools for Business Demonstration Summit in late October on Fill the Funnel TV. The Schedule will be published the first week of October. Make sure you are registered to receive the schedule of this first-ever 3 day event for Web Tools for Business. PeopleMaps and all of your favorites in the series will be participating and several have special offers only available during the Summit.
