Online networking is a great way to meet new people and to build your existing relationships. The more you take advantage of sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Sohobiztube.com, the more you will be able to connect with a lot of people.
However, be careful with who you connect with because you don’t want to just connect with anyone. You should focus on quality not quantity of the people within your network. Online networking should, whenever possible, mirror your relationships in the offline world.
Many times people who you don’t know will ask to connect with you, which is okay. Before you connect with them, make sure that there is a compelling reason. In fact, I usually won’t connect with someone unless we have had a phone conversation or even better met in person.
You want to be able to trust people within your network. One of the neat aspects of online networking sites is that you can connect people from your network to other networks and vice versa. Well, if you don’t know people that well, then it will be harder to ask for a referral.
These tools will be more effective with people who know you well. So be careful and don’t just let anyone in your online network.
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I think it's horses for courses.
This philosophy is fine for explicitly business-focused networks like LinkedIn, and is in fact the approach I adopt there.
Quite the opposite approach works better in, for example, twitter where I have benefitted from random links and from following up snatches of conversation 'overheared' in the stream of messages. Staying with twitter, I think of it as one big virtual party, or networking event if you prefer, where one of the points of being there is to meet new people.
Posted by: Owen Watkins | May 23, 2009 at 10:54 AM
Yes, good points Owen. I am speaking more from the business side of social networking. I agree that Twitter and others work well in the way you describe. Thanks for bringing this up.
Posted by: Jason Jacobsohn | May 24, 2009 at 07:22 AM