Professional Relationship Management with Cloze - CareerEnlightenment.com

A conversation with the founders showed that Foody, the CEO of Cloze, sympathizes with the average working person. “Everyone has too much to do these days,” he said, and with many social networking tools, “you have to do a lot of work to get a lot of value out of it.” In giving each relationship a score, Foody and Coté build on a network that you already have, rather than asking you to join and maintain another one.Cloze, which released in Beta last week, distills a flood of emails down to messages from people who are most important to you based on six factors: dormancy, frequency of contact, responsiveness, one-on-one versus group interaction, freshness of topic, and balance in reaching out and responding. The founders feel that this measurement is more reflective of reality than networks where all connections are on equal standing.If you want to share your network, you can invite someone into your “Inner Circle.” Here they can see your connections and where they work, how close you are to them, and request an introduction. By looking through your inner circle, a member will know if you have a working relationship with someone or have only met them once at a conference, which saves them time in trying to find the right contact and introduction the first time around.Foody and Coté have reexamined the professional network in light of their own professional experience and have concluded that, “what people most want is something that figures it out for you.”   Cloze will elevate those who use the site to manage their networks with those who have a natural talent for it. In other words, this product will level the networking playing field, helping you to bring back connections that might have slipped, and pull your network even “clozer.”