Super Connectors.

We all know them, they are followed by thousands on sites such as LinkedIn, CNN Money, YouTube and Facebook. They tweet and we listen, they post and we read, they ask and we answer, they pin and we get out the photo album. They aren't your colleagues at work, nor one of the boys at the local, they are the super connectors, people with such a wide range of relationships, they are able to link disparate social, economic and corporate platforms, giving them scope to change people's lives. They unlock doors, bring the right people together and hopefully do it all for the right reasons, for the super connectors without agenda are the gems in a mountain of coal, the needle in a hay stack and someone you should know.

The now famous Nebraska experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram in 1967, proved the world is small and easy to connect, even without the use of the net. He created the "six degrees of separation" notion that is now likely closer to three degrees of separation. Milgram sent a letter to a few hundred random people in Nebraska with instructions the letter be forwarded to an anonymous stock broker in Boston, whom they did not know. Each person sent the letter onto someone they knew, who they thought was more likely to know the stock broker. One third of the letters reached their destination after an average of six mailings but what was most surprising was the majority of letters passed through the hands of the same three Nebraskans. Three Nebraskans who even then, without the use of today's technology could be counted as super connectors.

From conferences to seminars through meetings and forums we hear about the people who network the best, who have that ability and confidence to mingle and not mangle in social and corporate circles. They don't have to be close friends, in fact they are likely to be on the fringes of your circles as theorised by Malcolm Gladwell when he discussed the 1974 study by sociologist Mark Granovetter assessing a group of men in Newton, Massachusetts and how they found their jobs. Granovetter found 56 percent of those surveyed found their current job through personal relationships, with only 19 percent using traditional job-searching routes, newspapers and executive recruiters and 10 percent applying directly to an employer. What was also surprising is, of those in the study, only 17 percent saw their personal contact often, like good friends, 55 percent saw their contact only occasionally and 28 percent barely met with their contact at all. Considered a seminal work, Granovetter's findings have been confirmed again and again via continuous research and today are more relevant than ever because that super connector you seek isn't likely part of your family circle or one of your work colleagues. It's because your close relationships exist in your world and know the things you know and do the things you do, that the importance of knowing someone from outside the circle, with more connections and accessing different information becomes paramount.

The value of these super connectors lies in the way they do business, helping others achieve because the noise around networking has always been about individualism and what's in it for me. Being that guy at the party is something a lot of us want but sometimes it's just easier knowing who he is. With more than a billion people, one in seven on the planet, connected via the plethora of networks, the importance of knowing a super connector, or even someone who knows someone who is a super connector has become important if you have aspirations, ambition or just want to change the world. Let me know if you know someone like that, I'd like to change the world too.