I often rail in my blogs and talks about people employing broad connection strategies, such as ‘LinkedIn Open Networkers’. The focus on connecting with as many people as possible, without due regard for developing relationships with those connections, makes little sense to me, hence my business strapline ‘Connecting is not Enough’.

I do know a number of people who advocate this practice strongly and who also make occasionally compelling arguments to justify the approach but it simply has never felt right to me.

Arguments about the merits of quantity vs quality in your network aside, there is something else much more important to consider. If you want to build a huge network based on an exchange of clicks then you are entitled to do so, but do you know who is in your network?

I’m not talking just about knowing the people behind the profile but do you even know if they are the person represented in the profile? Recent years have seen a huge growth in ‘Catfishing’ scams, where criminals use the profile information from an innocent party, pose as them and then defraud someone else under their assumed guise.

The more people you connect to without really knowing them, the more accessible your information is to such fraudsters. I think that we do need to bear some responsibility for not making life too easy for them.

In some cases, you might not even be connecting to a fraudster. I had dinner last week in Singapore with a British couple who work there. A couple of years ago the couple’s then two year old daughter Chloe, started to play with her mother’s iPad, which was unlocked and open on LinkedIn.

Chloe happily pressed away, sending connection request after connection request to complete strangers. Worryingly a number of these strangers accepted Chloe’s invitation. They were probably patting themselves on the back for growing their network by one more, not realising that their new connection was a 2 year old!

In my view, many of the connections made without any interaction might as well be toddlers for all the value they will add to your business. Yes, you might have some criteria by which it makes sense to connect with strangers but you can at least act in your own interests and that of your wider network and the social networking community, by starting a conversation and satisfying yourself that you know who is typing away on the other keyboard.