What Relationship Mapping Means to Me

By Zach

Last year I was in Taiwan teaching English to Taiwanese children. Thousands of miles prevented me from seeing my family and friends for over a year. Although the Pacific Ocean separated me from my home in the U.S., I didn’t lose a beat with everyone that mattered to me. I was able to e-mail my family, video chat my friends, stay current with events, and even continue to do my banking back home.

I was lucky. If I went overseas to teach before the internet it would have been entirely different. Waiting by the mailbox for the day’s post. Eagerly reading my letters from home. Scanning the newspaper for any news back home. I would have been entirely disconnected and off the grid, a concept that is long forgotten in today’s era of connectivity.

My complete and utter reliance on the internet while overseas brought to light a couple of truths about the world wide web. For starters, what would we do without the internet? I was afforded the opportunity to connect with my friends and family, allowing me to stay close with them as the months passed by. I could stay up to date with any current event and find out anything I wanted to about the unfamiliar country I was in. However, the information available to me on the internet was mind-boggling. The concurrent truth, perhaps inconveniently, is that the internet has too much information and at times can be overwhelming.

An overwhelming amount of information on the internet is a problem. Numerous tools are available for like-minded people who think as I do, tools that cut down search times and capture the excess amounts of information in concrete ways. Relationship Mapping is one of those tools.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are tasked with doing research on an individual as a researcher needing to uncover information about a prospect, as a salesperson wanting to better understand a target, or as a teacher working overseas trying to connect with a long lost friend back home. Your first step would be to search him or her and peruse the information available. What that individual did last year, where he/she went to school, where they worked, etc. The likelihood that you would run into dead-end information is high, the likelihood that you would discover false information is high, and the likelihood that you would fall well short of completely understanding that individual is marginal. Consequently, the chances that you get overwhelmed by the information at your fingertips increases. This is where Relationship Mapping can help.

Relationship Mapping aims to take the overwhelming amount of information on the internet and simplify it for your needs. The tool takes on the headache for you. It combs the internet for information that matters to you. Relationship Mapping finds out who knows whom, how, and how well.

So let’s say you run the same search on that individual, this time using Relationship Mapping as a tool. You effectively put together a biographical report and with the click of a button you uncover the most important thing in this ever-changing world: relationships. No more long hours of skimming long-lost articles to see if you can find a connection, Relationship Mapping does that for you. No more useless information. No more headaches. You were tasked with doing research on an individual, and you come out the victor, not the internet.

There is no denying the power of the internet. But there is some definite truth in the fact that there is too much information out there. This truth is one of the main reasons why tools such as Relationship Mapping exist. They aim to make sense of the vast amount of jumble out there. In the case of Relationship Mapping, it helps people uncover valuable information quickly and efficiently. Without it, headaches will ensue.

My headaches were marginalized as my year went on in Taiwan. Notwithstanding the clutter I had to sift through from time to time, I was blessed by the world wide web. Half a world away I was able to talk to the people that I care for most, stay in the know, and concentrate on what was in front me, not what I left back home. I now turn to helping people concentrate on what’s important in their professional lives. I want to alleviate people’s problems over the internet. I want to turn searches on individuals into something fun, not a nightmare.

What’s your story?