Relationships

In the Relationships window, you discover connection paths to millions of executives and companies in the g2 Database. You can also find the connections from any executive in the database to another executive or company. To open the Relationships window, click the Relationships tab in the g2 window.

The following example finds the connections between an invented g2 user, John Smith, and an actual executive in the g2 database.

Type the executive's first and last name in the To: input boxes.
Click SEARCH.
Choose the executive in the Alternative Connections pane and click ADD.
Click CONNECT in the MAP RELATIONSHIP pane.

The results are displayed in the RELATIONSHIP PATHS pane. The picture below shows several relationship paths to the executive Steven Jobs. Note: g2 displays many other relationship paths that are not shown in the picture.

If there are many relationship paths, it is usually convenient to group them by companies and executives, as explained in Grouping Results.

Relationship Paths

A relationship path is a chain of people, starting with yourself (or an executive in the g2 database) and ending at the targeted executive or company. Each person has a direct connection with the next person in the chain - for instance, they may have both worked at the same company. As an example, look at the second relationship path shown in the picture above.

The first person in the path is George Reyes, an executive whom the user John Smith knows personally and has listed as one of his affiliated executives. g2 shows this connection by displaying "Affiliate" in the ORGANIZATION column in the FIRST DEGREE pane.
The second person in the path is Ann Mather. If you click the names George Reyes and Ann Mather, you see from their biographies that Reyes is Senior Vice President and CFO of Google Inc., and that Mather is currently on the Board of Directors of Google. So Reyes has a connection to Mather through Google, as shown in the SECOND DEGREE pane.
The third person in the path is the targeted executive, Steven Jobs. Since Ann Mather was formerly a Senior Vice President at The Walt Disney Company, and Steven Jobs is currently on the Board of Directors of The Walt Disney Company, Mather has a connection to Jobs through The Walt Disney Company, as shown in the THIRD DEGREE pane.

Degrees of Relationship Paths

The degree of a relationship path is the number of people on the path from you to the targeted executive, not counting yourself. The example above is a third-degree relationship path.

Note: The numbers in parentheses in the RELATIONSHIP PATHS pane tell you the number of relationship paths of degree one, two, or three.

If John Smith searches for his relationships to George Reyes, he finds a first-degree connection.

He also has a first-degree relationship to anyone who has worked for one of his affiliated companies, as shown in the following example.

In this case, John Smith has listed Bose Corporation as an affiliated company, so he has a first-degree connection to Bob Rozek, who works at Bose.

Note: It is recommended that you list your own company as an affiliate, so that you will have a first-degree connection to all executives at your company.

You can also search for your relationships to a company by selecting Company in the To: field and entering the name of the company in the Company field. You have a first-degree connection to any of your affiliated companies.

A Second-Degree Relationship Path

If John Smith searches for his relationships to Ann Mather, he finds a second-degree relationship path.

He also has a second-degree relationship to any company that has employed one of his first-degree executive connections. For example, since the affiliate George Reyes works for Google Inc., John Smith has a second-degree relationship to Google.

The following table summarizes the possible degrees of your relationships to executives and companies. An executive is affiliated with a company, or vice-versa, if he or she has worked for the company, served on its Board of Directors, or has some other direct connection with the company.

	First Degree	Second Degree	Third Degree
Companies	Your affiliated companies	Companies affiliated with your first-degree executive connections	Companies affiliated with your second-degree executive connections
Executives	Executives affiliated with one of your affiliated companies Your affiliated executives	Executives affiliated with a company with which you have a second-degree relationship Executives listed as an affiliate by a g2 user at your company	Executives affiliated with a company with which you have a third-degree relationship

Grouping Results

If a relationship search returns many paths, you can group them by companies and executives. To do so, click GROUP RESULTS at the top of the RELATIONSHIP PATHS pane. The results are grouped into folders, as shown in the example below.

Each folder contains a group of relationship paths:

The "Affiliate" folder contains the paths that begin with one of John Smith's executive affiliates.
The "Bose Corporation" folder contains the paths that begin with executives at Bose, which John Smith has listed as an affiliated company.
The "Generate Inc." folder contains the paths that begin with executive affiliates of John Smith's co-workers at Generate Inc.

You can click any folder to expand the relationship paths it contains, as shown below.