There's a new kind of underachiever. It's the professional who invests an excessive amount of time in connecting with other professionals through social networks, smartphones, and in-person meetups. Also in the connector's bag of tricks is overseeing communities on LinkedIn and Twitter.
From this comes little or no work. The tragic flaw is the inability to convert relationships into jobs or assignments.
The reality of this economy of scarcity is that just about every professional is on the hustle to extract information and insight from other professionals. No, there is no long term objective of building a network.
Therefore, although professional outreach is necessary it quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns in getting work. More useful, for example in my field, is increasing my concrete experience in a niche such as financial communications or academic public relations. That I can leverage in a direct way. That gets me assignments.
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