Ask HN: How would you identify potential relationships for businesses?

1 points by wwsculley 17 years ago | 4 comments

Hey HN,

I would like your advice on how to assess potential inter-business or inter-institutional relationships for any sort of industry.

By relationships, I mean any connection between two businesses. For example, how can you tell a local independent grocer that his business would benefit from initiating a relationship with Business X. Business X could be a supplier, another neighborhood grocer looking for a partnership (why?), a local website that specializes in promoting local grocers, etc.

In other words, how does one identify a business's potential for making mutually beneficial connections?

If you were to build a one-size-fits-all template to assess this type of potential for any sort of business in order to facilitate these connections, what variables would you look at - size, location, etc.?

I have been thinking about these questions for a while now, but hit a wall recently. I thought I would pose this to some other minds.

wallflower 17 years ago |

"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"

I know you are trying to address a classic problem that excellent networkers solve all the time (e.g. "You should talk to my friend Joe"). However, they are connecting people they already know. Even if you were able to figure out what businesses should connect, you will probably need who at those particular businesses should be connected. I don't think you can remove the human element from networking. LinkedIn succeeds because they are a powerful tool for managing a professional network and a lesser tool for reputation scoring (other startups are addressing that - check out http://anthillz.com). They do have a 'people you might want to add as a connection' but they pretty much remain in the background. LinkedIn is going to be hard to beat - they have the data and have gone beyond critical mass.

wwsculley 17 years ago | |

I understand that the focus is/has been on the personal connections that people have. But my reservation about personal relationships alone is that the impetus to act on these relationships - to develop them into actual institutional connections - is inconsistent.

In the past few months alone, friends/connections have contacted me because they were looking for a job or a way to develop their business and <i>just happened<i> to see my employer on LinkedIn, or incidentally saw that I had a connection-by-degrees with someone at another company they wanted to reach.

These cases tell me that too many connections are purely incidental. I think an objective framework that could capture these potential connections.

That said, what are the typical objective elements of the business-relationship process that can be identified without the need of human proactive declaration of business needs/offerings? What sort of characteristics would you include in an 'institutional profile' that would help other businesses understand the potential for a mutually beneficial connection?

wallflower 17 years ago | | |

> what are the typical objective elements of the business-relationship process...

This is actually turning out to be a fairly fascinating/interesting topic. Have done some preliminary Google 'research'.

Using Agents as intermediaries for business connecting:

http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas08/proceedings/pdf/i...

Abstract only but some juicy bits:

http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?refe...

"VisiVenue is an online service helping business people find, connect, and interact with one another more efficiently and effectively - using scored profile matching that gives you a "short list" automatically" http://calendars.techvenue.com/VisiVenue/

And if you're thinking blue-sky (in terms of data access) - merge the physical tracking with online tracking (where people frequent online):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/technology/22proto.html