Happy About Online Networking: The virtual-ly simple way to build professional relationships

Happy About® Online Networking The virtual-ly simple way to build professional relationships By Liz Ryan with a foreword by Tory Johnson

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Happy About Online Networking: The virtual-ly simple way to build professional relationships Copyright © 2006 by Happy About® All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without obtaining written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. eBook Version 1.0: October, 2006 ISBN 1-60005-016-6 Place of Publication: Silicon Valley, California, USA

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Other Happy About books available include: • Business Rule Revolution http://happyabout.info/business-rule-revolution.php • Happy About Global Software Test Automation: http://happyabout.info/globalswtestautomation.php • Happy About Joint Venturing: http://happyabout.info/jointventuring.php • Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting: http://happyabout.info/linkedin4recruiting.php • Happy About Website Payments with PayPal http://happyabout.info/paypal.php • Happy About Outsourcing http://happyabout.info/outsourcing.php • Happy About Knowing What to Expect in 2006 http://happyabout.info/economy.php Other soon-to-be-released Happy About books include: • Memoirs of the Money Lady http://happyabout.info/memoirs-money-lady.php • 30Day BootCamp: Your Ultimate Life Makeover http://happyabout.info/30daybootcamp/life-makeover.php • Happy About Working to Stay Young: http://happyabout.info/working-after-60.php • Happy About CEO Excellence: http://www.happyabout.info/ceo-excellence.php • Happy About Open Source: http://happyabout.info/opensource.php

Dedication To Michael

Acknowledgments My exposure to online networking began in 1995, thanks to my forward-looking sister Janet Ryan (at the time, publisher of the late, great publication MacUser). For their assistance with “Happy About Online Networking,” I’m especially grateful to my colleagues at WorldWIT (Christa Isenhart, Kristi Hughes, Angel West, Anne Jennings, Bill Phillips, Jennifer Mich, Kedra Hood and Shari Regenbogen); my networking pals Vincent Wright, Konstantin Guericke, Dave Taylor, Derek Scruggs, Ellen Forman, Mark Phillips, and Marcelle Esposito; the amazing WorldWIT Executive Directors Jessica Niehaus, Gigi Bozzano, Amy Robinson, Barbara Lynch Zaim-Sassi, Robyn Gruner, Danielle Cyr, Carolyn Moncel, Lee Laughlin, Nivedita Roy Ghatak, Valentina Cimino, Juliann Grant, Obehi Alegimenlen, Angela Williams, Susie Hollands, Forough Gharamani, Jane Kurts, Julia Zavileyskaya, Mary Olson, Sandra Eilenstein, and Tasha Kostantacos; and Jeannie Walters, Anne McLain, Rachel Greenfield, Susan Bateman, Edie Fraser, and Bob Arnold. Not to mention my patient husband Michael, long-suffering children Caty, Cormac, Eamonn, Declan and Darrien; Matt Branaugh of the Boulder Damily Camera; and Ric Rojas, who gives me energy to keep writing.

c o n t e n t s

foreword

Foreword by Tory Johnson, Founder and CEO of Women For Hire - - - - - 1

chapter 1

The Truth About Online Networking - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3 Ten Online Networking Myths - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -4 What is Online Networking?- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 9 How To Think About Online Networking - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 9 Key Points Discussed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 10

chapter 2

Getting Started; Understanding the Online Network - - - - - - - - 11 Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 12 Who's Online? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 14 Benefits of Online Networking - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 15 Ten Reasons Beyond Job-hunting and New Client Development to Network Online: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 15 Social Networking Sites and List-Servs - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 17 What is Social Networking? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 19 Understanding Social Networking- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 21 E-mail List-Serv Communities - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 21 WorldWIT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 22 How to Get the Most from E-mail List-Serv Memberships - - - - - - - - - - - 23 Ten Tips for Making the Most of Your E-mail Group Membership(s) - - - - - 23 Quality vs. Quantity - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 25 Ten Etiquette Tips for LinkedIn and Online Networking - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 26 How do I Integrate My Online and Offline Networks? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 30 Don't be Hatin,' or Boilerplatin': LinkedIn Invitations with a Personal Touch - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 32 Key Points Discussed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 35

chapter 3

Who Are You Online? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 37 Four Parameters for Developing your Online Persona - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 38 More Ways to Build Your Online Persona - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 42 Photos and Files - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 42

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Alumni Groups- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 42 Online Forums- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 43 Key Points Discussed- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 45 chapter 4

When Worlds Collide - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 47 Networking Abroad - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -48 Taking it Offline - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -49 Trust + Ideas = Action - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -49 Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #2- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 51 Writing to Strangers - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -53 Broadcasting - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 55 Key Points Discussed- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 56

chapter 5

Cultivating Your Network - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 57 Plaxo - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 57 Something of Value - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 58 Introductions - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 58 Ten Do's and Don'ts for Making, Accepting, and Following up on Online-Networking Introductions - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 59 Key Points Discussed- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 61

chapter 6

Online Networking Etiquette - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 63 Ten LinkedIn Do's and Don'ts - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 64 Ten Etiquette Rules for E-mail List-Servs - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 69 How Not to Network - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -70 Handling Sensitive Issues Online - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -73 Key Points Discussed- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 74

chapter 7

Online Networking for Problem-Solving - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 75 Online Networking for Job-hunters- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -75 How to Find a Job Using LinkedIn - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -76 Online Networking to Grow Your Business - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -79

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Contents

Using LinkedIn to Grow Your Business - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 79 Networking with Influencers vs. Networking with Clients - - - - - - - - - - - - 83 Key Points Discussed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 86 chapter 8

Creating an Online Networking Plan - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 87 Don't Write Checks You Can't Cash.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 88 Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 88 Key Points Discussed - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 90

appendix A

Networking Resources - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91 List of Major Social Networking Sites - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91 Online NetworkingRelated Email Discussion Groups (list-servs) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91 List of Online Networking Informational Websites - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91 Recommended Networking Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91

authors

About the Author - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 93

authors

Create Thought Leadership for Your Company? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 95

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Page x

Contents

f o r e w o r d

Foreword by Tory Johnson, Founder and CEO of Women For Hire Just as we’ve finally mastered the handshake, eye contact and thirty-second spiel, a whole new world of networking comes our way with a completely different set of rules. In the fast-paced frenzy of the Internet, no longer can we wing-it and expect stellar results; instead, to get what we want from online networking, we must understand the playing field and master the essential etiquette. For starters, I need help cutting through the clutter of websites to focus on the best resources with the greatest potential of positively impacting my career. When trying to navigate the social and professional networking sites, I admit I never know quite what to post when completing online profiles. Should I be funny and irreverent to catch a reader’s attention? Or is oh-so-serious both smarter and more professional when trying to convey an online persona? I’m not alone in this confusion. Just like other busy professionals—both tech-savvy and those not as comfortable with the online landscape, I’m equally interested in knowing the rules of engagement for reaching out virtually to new contacts. These days between list-servs, online forums, and more groups than are even imaginable, I truly believe that just about anyone is accessible via cyberspace, but how and where can I find them? And when I do, I want to be sure my method and style of communication compels them to respond. Fortunately, online networking guru Liz Ryan is a master at telling us just what we need to know. From teaching us how to maximize a presence online to showing us how to forge meaningful cyber connections and so much more, she leads us to victory with this comprehensive, user-friendly guide. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s doing anything online and wants to do it even better.

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foreword

c h a p t e r

1

The Truth About Online Networking

Congratulations to you — and welcome to the world of online networking! As someone who has been an online networker for a decade, I have made fast friends, cultivated terrific business contacts, and received life — and career-changing advice from the wonderful people I've met online. Online networking is neither expensive nor complicated, and it has major benefits for businesspeople who are willing to invest in relationships. This book is intended to give you the knowledge and tools you need to become an effective online networker. I have a friend who calls the online networking world, the realm he and I both spend countless hours in, "Thunderdome." The reference comes from the series of popular Mel Gibson films ("Mad Max" and its sequels) in which a post-apocalyptic civilization lives amidst the ruins of an earlier city. Why is the description apt? Because much of the infrastructure that makes today's online networking possible, was laid down during the go-go 1990's, the dot-com boom — that's the earlier civilization, now in ruins, that the name "Thunderdome" brings to mind. Today, the late-90's dot-com boom is a memory, but the pipes and wires that allow us to communicate almost instantly with networking contacts around the globe, remain — the pipes and the awareness of how technology can enable our human connections. Online networking has moved past the stage of being a nifty trick, a way to impress your friends by mentioning your good pals on five continents. In our global business world, online networking is becoming a business necessity. As with any new technology, there's a great deal of hype about online networking. Newbies enter the online networking arena expecting to find a sort of instant-connection machine inside their PC. They've heard

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about online dating, and think that maybe online networking works the same way: you type your specifics onto a screen, and out pops your next boss, next client, or Daddy Warbucks investor. It doesn't work quite that way. The purpose of this book is to equip you with an understanding of online networking systems; the tools and resources you'll need to get going; and a solid knowledge of online networking etiquette (and some reminders on basic networking protocols, including amusing horror stories) to allow you to jump online and network without fear. If you're new to the online networking arena, you'll know more than many, if not most, of the online networking crowd by the time you've finished this book. If you're a veteran, you should learn a few new tricks to make the most of your online networking activities. Before we get started with the How-Tos, there are a few online networking myths we should quickly kill off. Here are ten of my favorites:

Ten Online Networking Myths Myth One. Online networking is the art of finding jobs, business partners, investors, or new clients online.

This is a myth for semantic reasons. You can find all of these things, and more — advice, education, and moral support, for instance — through online networking. But online networking isn't a system or process for achieving these things online, any more than offline networking is the art of finding jobs, clients, or investors offline. Offline networking is the practice of meeting people, maintaining contact with them, and cultivating your relationships over time. Good things can and do result from those behaviors. But it would be cynical and crass to define offline networking as simply a way to get what you want through other people. And it works the same way online. In fact, this is a central tenet of this book: online networking, just as the old-fashioned offline kind, is always about connections between and among people, rather than the outcome of those connections. If you approach networking as a means to an end (I'll get a client! I'll get a job!) you'll be losing out on the rich possibilities embedded in the experience

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of networking online. If you approach online networking as connecting with and supporting other people, you'll be amazed at the results you get. Myth Two. Online networking is conducted totally in cyberspace.

The role of the Internet and ''cyberspace" varies in online networking, from total (the only way you interact with some online networking contacts may be online) to partial (I met my friend Vincent online, but now we prefer to talk by phone) to very limited (you may meet someone online originally, and then have a face-to-face relationship going forward). All of these examples include online networking activities, but all of your online networking program doesn't have to happen online. Sometimes you have to get away from the computer. Myth Three. In online networking, you can transact business without knowing Thing One about your new contact.

You can launch a Web site, sit back and collect the dollars if you're selling Lucky Bamboo plants online or collecting revenue via Google's AdSense™ program. If people come to your content site and click on your ads, or stop by your E-commerce site and buy your merchandise, you don't have to have a relationship with them. But that, of course, isn't online networking. In the early days, there was a heady, exuberant (irrational or otherwise) feeling to online networking, like "You're online! I'm online! Let's know each other!" People tend to be a little more cautious these days. If you remember all the way back to the late 90's, then you recall that some people would jump into a business relationship ("Sure, I'll do some freelance writing for you," or "No problem, I'll design a website for you") without a lot of preamble. But these days, online networkers are more judicious. Online or offline, they want to know with whom they're dealing, and that's an absolutely appropriate way to view things. You don't have to become fast friends to do business with people you meet online, but you have to show the same care and responsibility for the new relationship that you would if you met a person face-to-face in your own city.

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(My friend Jennifer met her boyfriend online, way back in 1996 when they were college students. Back then, the Web wasn't so crowded, and you could browse around and find a person's homepage any day of the week. Jennifer found Brian's homepage, and wrote to him... and the rest is history. Today, the Web is a bit more crowded. This generation's Jennifer and Brian are more likely to find one another on MySpace™ than through Brian's home-grown website.) Myth Four. In online networking, it's the number of contacts you've got that makes you successful.

Myth Four takes us smack into a raging controversy among online networkers, known as the QVQ (Quality versus Quantity) debate. It's pretty simple: the QVQ debate pits the more-is-better crowd (Team Quantity) against the die-hards who argue for a smaller, more robust network (Team Quality). As you read this book, you can decide which approach is best for you. But please accept my word, even so early in our relationship, that a large number of contacts is not the road to fame and fortune (at least not by itself). Myth Five. Online networking is free.

Online networking is cheap, but it's not free. As you dive into the online networking mosh pit, you'll become acutely aware of the value of your own time. When you've spent an hour reading two days' worth of list-serv digests, and another half-hour updating your online contacts and corresponding with your online buddies about nothing in particular, you'll realize that everything has a cost. It's true that many online networking resources are free to users. That's the good news. What's also true is that you'll need to budget your time, pay attention to what works and what doesn't work for you, and remove yourself from expensive (in the sense of time-consuming/low-yield) online networking entanglements promptly. We’ll look in detail at this topic later! Myth Six. Online networking is anonymous.

Remember the old New Yorker cartoon? It showed a dog sitting at a PC, with the caption "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Now, I have met and corresponded with some spectacularly doggy networkers online, and it's true that they were able to conceal their canine nature for awhile. But your true identity will come out sooner or later. With each

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passing day, the ways that a networker can learn the truth about you (using Google™, LinkedIn™, and a zillion other sources) grow. Ethical online networking includes honest and upfront communication about who you are (dachshund, Welsh corgi, etc.), what you want, and what you can and cannot deliver to a new contact. Myth Seven. Online networking requires sophisticated technical skills.

We're lucky this one isn't true! If it were, I'd be sunk, and plenty of prodigious online networkers would go down with me. Most of what you need to network online, you already have: a PC or Mac with an Internet connection, an E-mail account, and decent written English skills (this is assuming that you're networking using the English language). That's plenty to get started. Myth Eight. Online networking is cheesy.

How dare you! Online networking isn't cheesy, or at least, it doesn't need to be. The reason online networking can have a vulture-ish reputation is because of a small group of tacky, inappropriate online networkers. I shall share some stories from my dealings with that crowd in later chapters. For now, rest assured: online networking is what you make it, from the height of polite behavior to unspeakably rude and crass self-promotion. You get to choose what kind of online networker you want to be. Myth Nine. Online networking is mostly for job-seekers.

I can understand why you would think this myth is true. The big job sites like Monster.com™, CareerBuilder.com™ and HotJobs.com™ are mega-traffic magnets. But finding a job on a big jobs site is not online networking. It's more like purchasing Beatles paraphernalia on eBay™ than it is like making a new connection online. It's a batch process, for one thing. It's a commercial transaction, for another (or the prelude to a commercial transaction, called extending and accepting a job offer). Job seekers can gain a ton of ground by moving some of their networking energy online. But online networking is a terrific tool for everyone!

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Who can benefit from online networking? • • • • • • • • • • •

Job seekers Corporate people who have jobs Recruiters Consultants Attorneys Media people Government employees Not-for-profit and association people Academics and university staff professionals Students Stay-at-home people

Whom did I forget? Monks in religious communities can network online, and they do. Older people in assisted living communities can network online. If you name a group of people, there is an online community for them. Anyone who has a PC and an Internet connection can network online.

NOTE We should note something important here — this book is concerned with and intended for grown-ups. People under 18 should not be networking online, although there are safe, supervised sites developed for the purpose of helping young people cultivate pen pals and the like. As parents and community members, we are all responsible for keeping the Internet safe for children. Please teach your kids, your nephews and nieces, and other children in your sphere, that online networking is strictly an activity for adults. Myth Ten. Online networking is the process of collecting new contacts.

This myth is related to Myth Four, the one about building up a massive list of contacts. But it's a slightly different myth. Myth Four suggested that having a zillion online connections is the name of the game in online networking, which is definitely not a given. Myth Ten proposes that all you have to do, to network online, is to grab people's virtual business cards. False! The virtual business cards an online networker ends up

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with (or Plaxo contacts or LinkedIn connections) are the booby prizes, if that's all that he or she collects. It's the relationships behind those pieces of paper or blocks of text that make online networking worthwhile. Okay, we've demolished some myths. Now let's get going!

What is Online Networking? So what is online networking? Here's my definition: Online networking describes the set of activities associated with creating and nurturing business relationships via the Internet. It's not very complicated. Online networking, in my view, is merely taking advantage of online tools and resources to create and further business and personal relationships. Now, as soon as I write "business and personal relationships" we move into a marginal zone. If you want to, you might expand this definition of online networking to include all the tools, Web sites and activities associated with online dating. But to learn about those, you'll have to buy a different book. This book is concerned with business networking only. Is there an intersection between business networking and personal relationships, like friendships? Most definitely, and we'll explore that relationship in a later chapter; but we draw the line at online dating or purely socially-oriented meet-ups. In this book, we're interested in business networking, and if some friendship enters the picture, it's all good.

How To Think About Online Networking Here's a quick analogy to help you think about your online network and online networking activities. In the real world, you have a network. If you're a serious networker, you may have a firm grasp of the size, scope and composition of your network, but most of us don't have a clue. We just know that we know some people. In the real world, we're surrounded by people, some of whom we know well, and some of whom we barely know. We don't have to catalog those relationships or track their progress to know that we have some

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connections, at home, at work and in other arenas. We call on our contacts, they call on us, we help one another with various things. It's not all that complicated. Online networking simply moves these relationships, wholly or in part, online. Online networking increases our networking "reach" through the vast expanses of cyberspace. Online networking allows us to reach out to learn about people we'd never meet in "real life." Online networking allows us to leverage the relationships that our good friends have (simply by knowing that these relationships exist) and to keep better track of our own relationships. Online, we have the same networking responsibilities we'd have if we met a person at a Chamber of Commerce function in our own city. We have to be polite, and we have to focus on people rather than what they can do for us. We owe our contacts some level of responsiveness when they contact us, and we owe them the favor of not hitting them up at every turn for assistance or attention. We have to treat them, in other words, as we'd like to be treated ourselves.

Key Points Discussed Online networking is a practical, inexpensive way to develop and cultivate business relationships online. Online networks give their members powerful tools for growing their businesses, finding jobs, and collaboration, among other things. Online networking also creates responsibilities for networkers. None of the obligations that come with traditional, face-to-face networking are eliminated online.

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Chapter 1: The Truth About Online Networking

c h a p t e r

2

Getting Started; Understanding the Online Network

We've already touched on a key element of online networking, but we'll make the point again — online networking is not a matter of finding people online in order to immediately begin conducting transactions with them (getting a job, or selling one of your products, for instance). Online networking is a slightly newer, faster, more efficient variation on good old-fashioned face-to-face networking. Many of the same rules apply, although we employ them slightly differently in the online world. So let's talk a little about how people network offline, for comparison. During the 1990's tech-boom, there was a lot of irresponsible and borderline unethical advice being strewn about by so-called networking experts. A great deal of this advice had to do with "making your pitch." As a networker, you were instructed to memorize your 15- or 30-second "elevator pitch" and deliver it as often as possible into the upturned faces of the new people you were meeting. (Could be downturned faces, if you're short.) Either way, this is a bad way to network, and I don't recommend it. Networking is about people, not about delivering an audio version of your business card. You owe your new acquaintances more respect than to treat them as ready receptacles for your canned business speech. It's annoying, it's rude, and it's not effective. The key to networking, online or offline, is to treat people as human beings first, and to let the business results follow. If a person likes you and wants to help you, believe me, he or she will find a way. Treating every new interaction as an opportunity to 'deliver your business message’ is not going to help you develop the long-term, trust-based relationships that will make a difference for you over time.

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So before you move your networking activities online, you want to think about how you intend to communicate and to comport yourself in your online networking communities. Are you mostly interested in transactions — getting a job, finding a job candidate for a position you're filling, or securing a new client? If so (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with being results-focused), then you'll want to think about how you can temper your style to focus on creating relationships, rather than on viewing people as means to your ends. Treating a networking interaction as a quick ticket to new business is an approach I call Transactional Networking. It's fine to be all business, but does your let's-get-it-done approach take into account your contact's needs, or just your own? Transactional Networking short-circuits the relationship-building process (which takes time, and repeated interactions) in favor of the quick sale. There is a more human-centric way to network than the transactional approach. I call it Transformational Networking. Transformational Networking says "we don't know where this new relationship is going to go, and that's just fine. Let's let it develop however it's meant to happen, and in line with your priorities and style and with mine." That way, the relationship is the central point, and the outcomes — new jobs, new clients, and so on — fall out of that, rather than the reverse. Make sense?

Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #1 I was sitting at my desk when my phone rang. On the line was a young woman who found my profile on LinkedIn. My phone number is not listed in my LinkedIn profile, but my Web site URL is. So it's an easy thing to jump to my Web site and find my office phone number. "I thought maybe you could help me," she said. "You seem to know a lot about networking." "I hope so," I said. "What can I help you with?"

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"Well," she said, "you have a large network. I could use your help. I'm developing an idea for a reality TV show." "Aha!" I said. "It's not my area of expertise, but I certainly may have some ideas for you. You will want to talk to TV production people. I may know someone who knows someone you could be introduced to." "That would be perfect," she said. "What do you need to know?" "Well," I said, "if I knew more about your idea, I could think about who might be the best people for you to meet. Tell me, what are you thinking? What sort of reality TV program do you have in mind?" "Oh, I can't tell you that," she said. "You'd have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement." "Um," I said, "why would I do that? I have nothing to gain from knowing your idea, except to help you." "Well," she said, "I can't tell you the idea without a NDA." That was the end of that conversation. (Actually, I said, “Let me get back to you" and haven't quite found the right time, since then, to follow up.) Ha ha! My explanation of this young lady's behavior is this: she picked up an article about networking, intending to read it, but stopped reading after the first paragraph. She missed the part that explained why it's not a great technique to call up a complete stranger and ask for her help, and then ask her to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to talk to you!

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Who's Online? Now that you have a framework for online networking, it's useful to think about who networks online, and why. Recruiters are the traditional kings, queens and lesser nobles of online networking. If you network online and you're in business, you will meet one or many recruiters along the way. This makes sense, because recruiters have job openings to fill and need to create large databases of prospective candidates to fill those jobs. Don't take the view that recruiters are superfluous to you, just because you're not job-hunting. That's a big mistake! Recruiters can help you in lots of ways, and you can help them too. Recruiters need two things to be successful: clients and candidates. Every businessperson should have one or two very good recruiter contacts, and should help them meet clients and candidates. First of all, you'll be helping a hiring-manager, Human Resources, vice-president, or friend of yours if you introduce him or her to a good recruiter. Clearly, your job-seeking friends will benefit from meeting recruiters who can put them onto current openings. But your recruiter pal can help you too. He or she can advise you on your marketability, the state of your industry's job market, your going rate, and tons of other useful data. Businesspeople and recruiters are like early man and the local wolf pack — if they decide to, they can band together in a highly symbiotic relationship. Apart from recruiters, who else is online? Job-seekers are big online networkers, of course. Consultants are very big online networkers, too. The laggards, as I write these words in the summer of 2006, are currently-employed corporate people — no surprise, since they haven't had the same incentives (new job development or new business development) to get online and network. But this is changing. Not-for-profit, government, and military folks have been active mostly in their own, specialized online networking communities. This is starting to change, too.

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In the past, tech people and sales people have outstripped other career spheres in their use of online networking. This is another thing that's changing. New grads have been behind the curve where online networking is concerned (their priority seems to have been taking the time to create an elaborate MySpace profile, never making it over to the business networking sites to create a business profile), but this is changing too. That's a good thing, because while a typical socially-centric MySpace profile is more likely to be a hindrance to a new-graduate job seeker than a help, just the opposite is true of a LinkedIn profile or an otherwise adult/business-oriented approach to online networking. People network online to promote their products or services, to create alliances, or simply to build their contacts, especially outside their own cities or towns. By the time you read this, the online networking population may be double the size it is as I write this. In June of 2006, LinkedIn, the most popular online networking database site, had over 6.6 million users. That's a lot of people on one site! If you're not networking online now, what are you waiting for?

Benefits of Online Networking Apart from the obvious goals of getting a job or getting a client, why do people network online? Here are ten more reasons:

Ten Reasons Beyond Job-hunting and New Client Development to Network Online: 1. To create a web of contacts across industries, functions, and geographies. 2. To get advice from seasoned professionals on business issues they're facing. 3. To find collaborators for writing, speaking, consulting, or other projects. 4. To learn more about an industry, program, region, or function. 5. To conduct research for a study, a book, a television program, a film, etc.

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6. To create a higher profile than one could achieve offline – online networking is a tremendous way to accomplish this. 7. To cultivate a Brain Trust of close contacts who can support one another over time. 8. To expand business opportunities to new markets. 9. To improve networking skills (technical and social) in a new medium. 10.To help and advise other people, as a way of giving back and for the sake of the overall global, interconnected business community.

If you've thought of online networking as strictly a job-hunting process, you can see that that's a very limited view. Online networkers come in all shapes and sizes, and bring very different perspectives to the online networking party. Now you may be chomping at the bit, thinking "Okay, so let's do it." Here are a few key terms you'll need to understand before you launch your online networking program.

Profile:

Over and over, on Web sites and online communities the world over, you'll be asked to create a Profile. You should spend a little time thinking about this. Do you mostly want to talk about the fact that you've been a Logistics Manager for the past ten years? Or mostly talk about your international interests, or the freelance writing you've done? Your profile is key — it tells people everything you want them to know about you, and nothing else. Examples of information included in a profile might be: education, title, job background, associations/organizations to which you belong, professional and personal interests.

Connections

Think about your philosophy for connecting to people online. We'll get into this topic more in the section on LinkedIn, but connections are critical in your online networking life. You can't do much online without any connections. Do you believe that you should connect to every Tom,

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Dick and Mary who asks you to? Great. Do you believe that a connection is a deeply felt commitment for mutual support? Great. You'll want to pick a connecting philosophy, and go with it.

Introduction

On E-mail list-servs, online forums, and in other places, you'll have an opportunity to create a written introduction. Think about this one, too. What's important to you? For me, I like to include something personal, like the fact that I have small children or that I sing opera. How do you feel about that kind of disclosure? Spend a few moments thinking about the way you intend to introduce yourself, before diving in.

Expertise

Because online networking doesn't allow us the leisurely time that a face-to-face networking event does, we need to come out of the chute with some information on our areas of expertise as we meet new contacts. Why? Because their attention level, as they encounter us, will be based in part on their understanding of where we might add value to them. That's not bad — it's normal. It's important to be nice online, but virtually everyone is nice. Some people are nice, and they're experts too, so a lot of people want to know them. By the way, it's okay to be young and/or inexperienced. People absolutely love to help young people and junior people online, in my experience. The problem is that if you are young and/or inexperienced, you need to say so. It 'does no good to proclaim yourself an expert in something, if you're not. You'll be found out in a virtual heartbeat. Now that you've thought about these elements of online networking, let's grab some online networking turf!

Social Networking Sites and List-Servs We will talk about a dozen good tools for online networking, but we're going to focus on two "families" of tools that are highly effective, and almost define the online networking arena. The first group of tools we'll talk about is social networking sites. The second is E-mail discussion

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groups, also known as list-servs, or just "lists" for short. (List-serv is a commonly used term, but it's also a registered trademark of L-Soft, the software company that developed one of the oldest list-serv-management applications —called List-Serv-back— in the 1980's. Live and learn.) What's the difference between these two tools? Social networking sites are online databases of people, with features that allow users to browse through the database to find other users, contact other users, and connect to other users to share networks and perform other functions. With a few exceptions (including LinkedIn's Profile Update feature, that allows you to alert your entire network that you have, for instance, accepted a new job), the heart of a social networking site is one-to-one communication. You are a point on the network, and you can find another point (a person you want to talk to in, say, Hong Kong) and you reach out to him or her. The database is huge, but you can search for a person and make contact with him or her in a point-to-point way by seeking out and locating his or her profile. List-servs are very different. List-servs, also known as E-mail discussion groups, connect a group of people who share a common interest. Members agree to receive E-mail messages from the group (either one-by-one as messages are posted to the group, or once a day or even less frequently in a compiled "digest" of messages), and they also have the ability to post messages to the group themselves. In a list-serv community, each member has the ability to "pick up the megaphone" and address the whole gang when he or she has something to say, or needs advice on a topic. Any other member can answer the member's query. A list-serv is a point-to-many sort of network. You typically don't know the profiles of the folks in your list-serv group, although some of that functionality is emerging on Yahoo! Groups and elsewhere. But without knowing the identities of each person in your group, you can blast out your question and get great advice back, very quickly. Social networking sites and E-mail list-servs complement each other beautifully. Social networking sites follow the paradigm "If I can learn a few things about you — your job title and location, for instance — I can decide that I need to know you." E-mail list-servs follow the paradigm "I would love to know you, but I don't start out with the idea that I know

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exactly whom I need to know. All I know is that I need the answer to this question or help with this problem. If you're the person who can help me, by all means let me know!" Now let's dig into each of these important online networking tool "families." The major business-oriented social networking sites are LinkedIn™, OpenBC™, Soflow™, ecademy™ and Ryze™. And while it's not mandatory by any means, I strongly recommend that you get yourself going on one or more of the social networking sites mentioned here.

What is Social Networking? Social networking is a very simple idea. Social networking rests on the notion that we all know people, and that if we create a presence for ourselves on a social networking Web site like the ones listed below, then people can find us. On each of these social networking sites, people can not only find us and read about us (by virtue of a Profile that we will create for ourselves), they can also reach out to us and request contact. Going a step further, a person can request a connection, which, if accepted, connects his or her contact database to yours. You can instantly see the potential here: if you like me and I like you, and we combine our connections, then we'll both be connected to twice as many people. These social networking sites vary in their functionality. LinkedIn is based on the idea that we should connect to our pre-existing, trusted friends and contacts rather than contact — shopping through the site. (Still, super-connectors prowl the LinkedIn site, looking to connect to every person capable of fogging a mirror, and perhaps a few that aren't). OpenBC makes contacting a non-connected member easier than LinkedIn does. The sites vary quite a bit in their regional nature (OpenBC, for instance, seems to be big in Germany and the UK) and in other ways. It's a very good use of your time to browse around these sites and see how you feel about each one.

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LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the largest and most well-known social networking site focused on business. (Friendster and MySpace are very large sites, but not business-focused). LinkedIn's basic membership is free. OpenBC (www.openbc.com) is a very popular social networking site in Europe. More and more U.S. users are jumping on this site, which has a basic, free level of membership. Soflow (www.soflow.com) is another social networking site, more popular outside the U.S. than in from my experience. ecademy (www.ecademy.com) is a social networking site that allows users (with some guidance) to create sub-communities around topics of interest, functions or geographies. As an ecademy user, you'll hear from other members who have viewed your profile and want to make contact with you, and you can, of course, meet networkers in the same way. Ecademy has various levels of functionality and has a limited-use, free version. Ryze (www.ryze.com) is a very old (in Internet terms) social networking site, with a mix of business and "social" social networking. Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a social networking site for college students, with a strong social and partying slant. It's not one my top ten (or top ten million) recommendations for business people, and in fact, you can't get in without a college ID. MySpace (www.myspace.com) is a popular social networking site for teens. Stay away. Do you want my opinion? Join LinkedIn; then see if any of the other three sites makes sense for you as a backup tool. LinkedIn is huge, it's growing by ten thousand new users a day, and everyone is there. It's like the best mall in town: people know that people go there, so more people go there, which makes it that much harder for a smaller mall to gain traction. LinkedIn adds new features like crazy, so it can become a part-time job (but fun) to keep up with them.

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Understanding Social Networking The key to success with a social networking site like LinkedIn, OpenBC or Soflow is to create a Profile that truly describes the way you'd like to be known; to connect to people, good friends or new friends, with whom you'd like to share contacts and recommendations; and to actively use the site you join. It may take you awhile to browse around and become familiar with the site's features. Do it!

E-mail List-Serv Communities Now as we already mentioned, E-mail list-servs are complementary to the social networking sites. They connect a group of people who agree to receive E-mail messages from the group, and are granted the privilege of asking the group for help. For the most part, E-mail list-servs are free. They are invaluable — you can join a new E-mail list, read the posts there, and quickly get answers to your most vexing problems. You may read another member's post one day and realize that you and she (or he) should absolutely be in touch with one another. Then, because typically that member's E-mail address is also posted along with his/her message, you can write to her and say "I love what you wrote about CRM systems. Want to talk by phone?" List-servs are instant community; you join, and if you like the conversation and the energy, you've found an online networking home. The big kahuna for E-mail list-serv communities is Yahoo! Groups™. Yahoo! Groups is of course owned by Yahoo!™, and it's a site where people like you and me can go to launch and manage free E-mail discussion groups (list-servs) on any topic they like, or to join a list that someone else has already started. There are list-servs residing on Yahoo! Groups on every topic under the sun (including some list-servs you wouldn't tell your mother about) and you can start a new one any time you like. Membership in a Yahoo! Groups list-serv is free, unless it's a private list maintained by a membership organization for the use of its members. In that case, you may find the list-serv in the Yahoo! Groups directory, but you won't be allowed to join it unless you also belong to the hosting organization.

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You can browse the Yahoo! Groups site and see what kinds of list-servs are there. To get started, use the search term "Business" or "Networking" plus your city name. Or look for industry-specific or function-specific list-servs to join. You can join a bunch of them, to see which ones interest you; when the E-mail load from all that joining-up becomes burdensome, drop out of the list-servs that aren't your cup of tea.

WorldWIT WorldWIT (www.worldwit.org) is a private E-mail list-serv community hosted on its own servers, not on the Yahoo! Groups site. I started the WorldWIT community in 1999, in Chicago, with a local networking group called ChicWIT. ChicWIT was followed by MassWIT in Boston and then 80 other local E-mail groups, and the WorldWIT network was formalized and incorporated in 2001. WorldWIT is like a collection of E-mail groups that allow local conversation, while also allowing members to converse between groups. Membership is free. WorldWIT is a women's community, dedicated to Supporting Women at the Intersection of Work and Life — but men are welcome to join. WorldWIT works much like a Yahoo! Groups E-mail list, with a few key differences. Members join their own local chapter of WorldWIT, like MapleWIT in Ontario or ArkWIT in Arkansas. But, as a member of any WorldWIT group, they can post to any other WorldWIT chapter. WorldWIT's E-mail groups are closely moderated. A moderator reads every message before it is posted. This ensures that the messages are relevant, non-spammy, and easy to read. Members use WorldWIT groups to get advice on marketing, career, technical, financial, general business and "life" issues — and, of course, to network and meet one another. WorldWIT also hosts blogs, tele-seminars, live events and other events and tools to help members network with and learn from one another.

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How to Get the Most from E-mail List-Serv Memberships By joining a few relevant Yahoo! Groups E-mail lists, and your local WorldWIT chapter, you'll quickly get a feel for the conversation on each discussion list. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your E-mail list membership(s).

Ten Tips for Making the Most of Your E-mail Group Membership(s) 1. Watch and learn. As you join a new E-mail group, read the group's postings for a few days to get a feel for the conversation. Yahoo! Groups E-mail lists, WorldWIT groups, and most other E-mail discussion groups will allow you to choose between receiving individual messages (each message arrives in your inbox as it is posted) or digests (several individual posts, or a day's' worth, are collected into one message that you'll receive on a regular basis). Some E-mail groups also include the option to view messages online, without receiving messages in your inbox at all. Before you post a message yourself, read a few days' worth of posts to see what people are talking about, how messages are typically written, the level of formality/informality in the group, and the general tone of conversation. 2. Say howdy. You will want to introduce yourself to the group, but wait a few days (after joining a new E-mail list) before taking that step. That way, you can make sure that your introduction is well received and that you don't interrupt a focused group discussion. For instance, if the group is in the middle of an intense discussion about the death penalty, it might not be an ideal time to pop into the conversation with "Hi! Nice to meet you all — I'm Ginger from Kansas City." 3. Chime in. Respond, as appropriate, to other members' postings. The way to create an online persona in an E-mail group is to write thoughtful, helpful posts, and to focus on supporting the other group members, rather than on promoting yourself. If you have valuable advice to share on a topic raised by another member, post your response back to the group, rather than to the individual

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member who asked the question. That way, all the members can benefit from your observations. 4. Put your name out there. Include your complete E-mail signature with every post you write, but know when enough is enough — your signature should be six lines maximum, including your name, contact info and whatever else your E-mail signature includes. 5. Know the rules. Pay attention to the E-mail group's protocols! Some groups publish their posting guidelines, and others rely on members' attention to the kinds of messages that they see posted (and sometimes, on directions posted to the list by the moderator). Violating group protocols may get you kicked out of the group, and if nothing else, will not endear you to the other members. 6. Make overtures with caution. If you decide to reach out to an individual member, make sure that your outreach is appropriate. Most E-mail lists allow or even require members to include their E-mail address with their posts, and so the groups are sensitive to spamming of members by one another. For instance, if a member of an E-mail list posts a question about his job search, you can write to that member individually (in E-mail list jargon, "off-list") about that topic. But it wouldn't be appropriate to write to him and say "Looking for work? Maybe you are short on cash. I can refinance your home and get you a great new mortgage!" That is spam, and it's the opposite of online networking. 7. Not sure? Ask. If you're not sure about whether a message you'd like to post is appropriate for the group, write to the moderator directly before you post the message to the group. If there is no moderator, write to the list owner — whose E-mail address should always appear in every individual message or digest that you receive. 8. Check the read/write requirements. Some people are very comfortable posting often to the E-mail lists they belong to, and others prefer to read the posts written by others. In E-mail list terms, these "readers" are called "lurkers," an unfortunate (and dated) term that suggests something nefarious is afoot when

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people read more than they write. Some E-mail lists, in fact, require every member to post with a certain frequency in order to stay in the group. Learn the rules for the groups you subscribe to. Some E-mail lists are very loose and casual, and others are incredibly uptight. You'll learn, before much time has elapsed, which groups fit your style in terms of content, protocols, tone, etc. 9. Avoid the flames. A very common and unfortunate aspect of E-mail list conversation is "flaming," which is the sad practice of members insulting one another in back-and-forth E-mail tussles called "flame wars." A good moderator can tamp out a flame very quickly or avoid it entirely, but whatever happens, do not, do not indulge in one. If you feel you've been insulted in an E-mail group, do your best to ignore the insult. If you feel the group's value is less than the annoyance of dealing with flamers, drop out, rather than succumbing to the urge to jump into the ring. 10.Know the players. It will not take you long to learn who's who in an E-mail list conversation. If you feel that individual list members should be in your network and vice versa, make a one-on-one (off-list) introduction and suggest a phone chat or, if you're in the same region, a face-to-face meeting. List-servs are great for sharing information and making initial contact with people you should know, but you're going to need to get off-list to move the relationship to the next level.

Quality vs. Quantity Earlier, we mentioned the QVQ debate — a major philosophical divide among online networks. Is quantity (knowing a million people online, and having a million contacts) more important than quality? How can you make that determination for yourself? LinkedIn users debate the QVQ issue on list-servs (including the popular MyLinkedInPowerForum E-mail group, on Yahoo! Groups), on blogs, and on their own Web sites. For some professionals, notably recruiters, it's important to know a very large number of people. The more people you know and can connect to, on a site like LinkedIn or an E-mail list-serv, the more candidates you can tap for a current assignment.

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For networkers looking for other kinds of relationships — not to tap a huge candidate pool but to create significant, perhaps time-intensive or highly-trusted business partnerships, it may be more important to have a few strong contacts than a zillion weak ones. On LinkedIn, a typical newbie behavior is to connect to a lot of people initially, and then to learn over time which connections truly add value. If you connect to people on LinkedIn whom you don't really know, you may be annoyed down the road by these near-strangers' requests (for introductions, e.g.) and conclude that fewer, better connections are more your style. If you want to disconnect to a LinkedIn connection, you can write to LinkedIn's customer care department to cut the cord. On E-mail list-servs, you're exposed to a bunch of people simply by virtue of participating in the group. But if you only read messages ("lurk") and don't post, you'll be like the tree in the forest that falls when no one is there to see it. No one will know you exist! So, if you're interested in networking (as in building your network) and not just learning from other people's conversation, you've got to post a message of your own once in a while.

Ten Etiquette Tips for LinkedIn and Online Networking After a decade (and for some of us, longer) online, we know all about Netiquette, right? Don't use all capital letters in your subject line (or, God forbid, the body of an E-mail message). Don't send attachments to people who don't know you well. Don't we know pretty much everything there is to know about etiquette online? Well, maybe not. Online networking sites like LinkedIn can challenge our ideas about what constitutes white-lace-handkerchief behavior online. In fact, if we've learned that it's important to be polite when using E-mail, it's even truer in the social networking sphere. Here are ten tips for establishing yourself as a well-mannered online networker, when using LinkedIn: 1. Create a user-friendly profile. Your LinkedIn profile is your virtual business card. Make sure that it represents you the way you want to be viewed by strangers — make that "people you haven't been introduced to, yet." A sketchy LinkedIn profile signals that your

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busy day doesn't allow you to fill in trivial details like what you're doing now, what you've done in the past, or any other useful information. Such an incomplete profile won't serve you as you network on LinkedIn, but it's impolite as well: its message is "I'm going to use this database to find people, but I won't bother to include enough information about myself to indicate how I might assist anyone else." Take a few moments to fill in the gaps. 2. Invite true friends — or at least, true acquaintances — to connect. Spam is spam, and you must have a minimal level of contact with a person before inviting him or her to connect with you on LinkedIn. A contact — a less-intrusive overture than an invitation to connect — is a good way to approach people with whom you have no relationship. LinkedIn users vary in their views on how well you must know someone before connecting to him or her, but it's inappropriate to send connection invitations to people who have never met you, heard of you, or had any inkling of your existence (unless they have indicated a desire to be approached by strangers). Think about it: if you found a person's phone number on a scrap of paper, you wouldn't feel that you had permission to phone him. Your possession of an E-mail address doesn't give you license to contact an unacquainted LinkedIn user and suggest a connection — and it's this kind of overzealous outreach that gets users in trouble with LinkedIn, as well. 3. When you make a request, be clear about your intentions. You'll find your LinkedIn contacts generally happy to forward your requests if you approach them politely and are clear about your goals. In the physical world, if you asked a friend to introduce you to his friend because of a mutual interest in sailing, and then actually hit the friend-of-a-friend up for a loan, you'd be viewed as a sneak. It's no different online. If you're job-hunting, say so. If you're looking for investors, ditto. A wolf in sheep's clothing soon finds his messages sitting, unforwarded, while his LinkedIn contacts wonder whether he can be trusted. 4. Reciprocity is a wonderful thing, and gratitude is key. When possible, it's great to include in your LinkedIn outreach messages some suggestion that you're aware of your obligations as a requester. That could mean an offer to make a useful introduction

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for the person who's forwarding yours, or an offer to help in some other way, or just a heartfelt thank-you for the introduction you seek. It's disconcerting for your first-degree forwarder to receive a slew of requests from you in one day (and this is common when one of your first-degree contacts is more-highly-connected than others) with no acknowledgement at all of the favor you're asking. LinkedIn is no different from the "real" world, in that sense: asking for an introduction is a favor, and it's nice to show gratitude for that. 5. Pass along requests promptly, or say why you won't. Membership in LinkedIn is a kind of agreement with the community that you intend to participate as an active node in a large and vibrant network. If people send you requests and they sit there, unforwarded and unresponded-to for weeks, you're not only the weak link in the system, you're also impeding someone else's business efforts, and giving no reason for your bottleneck behavior. If you can't forward on a request or move a communiqué forward, say so — and say why. LinkedIn provides a handy list of reasons for declining a request, plus an "other" option — use 'them. 6. Avoid the boilerplate text when extending connection invitations. It takes very little time to put your own stamp on the standard invitation language that LinkedIn supplies. For instance, you could mention something impressive that you've heard about the person you're contacting, or give an old friend a quick update on your doings. Using the boilerplate text shows a certain want of effort — so, even if you stick with the standard language, why not add "sorry to use the boilerplate text, but I'm not much of a wordsmith?" 7. Don't abuse your network. Once you have cultivated a network, it's tempting to reach out to the gang anytime you have news or a need for assistance. And LinkedIn's functionality allows you to broadcast a note to your posse of contacts, by way of a Profile Update blast. Use these sparingly, not as a substitute for the Daily All About Me Newsletter. If you do, you may find yourself being

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un-connected from people who can't manage the high volume of what's-new-in-your-life mailings. 8. Don't invent history to acquire colleagues. LinkedIn allows you to find former workmates at any company that has employed you, without being connected to them otherwise. Finding a colleague match only requires that you and another person worked at the same organization during the same time period. So, as tempting as it may be to make connection with people who worked in various appealing companies over the years, if you invent a work history in order to do that, you're going to Hell. Perhaps that is overstated, but if you falsify your employment history on LinkedIn in order to create colleague-links with people you haven't actually worked with, it's an abuse of the LinkedIn system and the trust of the LinkedIn community. 9. Play by the rules. There are a number of ways to misuse LinkedIn in such a way as to convey the message, "I don't care about the long-term health of this network or the company that built it — this is All About Me." Including your E-mail address in your LinkedIn name, for instance, makes a fee-for-use service like InMail superfluous for someone who wants to reach you, which is (if nothing else) exceedingly rude, seeing as how LinkedIn provides the basic functionality to users at no charge. Unless you want to broadcast the message, "I don't care whether LinkedIn can optimize its revenue strategy or not — I'm going to optimize my connect rate," you might consider rethinking your Me First approach. 10.Value relationships over transactions. As in physical-world networking, valuing people for their intrinsic worth over the business transactions they enable is key. No less than in middle school, "users" are never welcome company for long. "Ka-ching" networking — the kind of outreach that signals "Say, you could make me a buck today" is unseemly and unfortunate. LinkedIn is a fabulous tool that enables connectors and influencers to help other people and achieve their own goals, too — and it's great when we keep those priorities in balance.

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Happy networking!

How do I Integrate My Online and Offline Networks? A great question that online networkers ask is how to manage their online and offline networks to best effect. First off, to manage your network, you've got to have a network to manage. This means that you've got to find a way to keep track of the people you know and would like to maintain contact with. Traditional tools like Outlook's™ Address Book, ACT!™, Goldmine™, and Excel™ are great for creating and maintaining a contact database. But if you're going to move some or most of your networking online, it makes sense to utilize an online tool to help manage your network. If most of your contacts are on LinkedIn, you're in luck: the LinkedIn site itself becomes your contact manager. The people you're connected to are right there, and because you have the privilege of viewing the E-mail address of each of your first-degree (direct) LinkedIn connections, you'll have a portable, always-available, online contacts directory at your disposal. But what if many of your online contacts are not LinkedIn users? You have a few choices:

Plaxo

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Plaxo is a popular, free (in its basic version) online contact management application. When you join Plaxo, you can download your Outlook address book and blast out a Plaxo message to everyone in it. The message from Plaxo will ask each contact to update his or her profile and return the information to you. This is great, because it's quick, there's no manual labor on your part, and your address-book information will (theoretically) never get out of date.

Chapter 2: Getting Started; Understanding the Online Network

The problem with Plaxo is that if you find you've got a dead E-mail address for one of your contacts — say, if someone has changed jobs without notifying you — Plaxo won't help you find him or her. LinkedIn is a great way to find the person, and so is a standard Google search; but you'll have to get a new, valid E-mail address before Plaxo will help you keep track of this person again. Also, some users feel that Plaxo is spammy, because every time one of your Plaxo-using contacts changes jobs, phone numbers or E-mail addresses, you'll get a notifying message. If you have a lot of Plaxo-using contacts, those messages can pile up fast! But Plaxo gets our vote for doing what it says it's going to do. We have seen update requests from a competing site, called MyAddressBook.com, but from our perspective this site looks like a hobbyist/non-business-user's solution. So using Plaxo to keep your friends' contact information up-to-date is a good idea, and LinkedIn is a great, complementary tool that accomplishes the same purpose (except that phone numbers and street addresses aren't displayed on LinkedIn). But that doesn't help you with that stack of business cards on your desk! Here are two suggestions for getting a handle on your business-card stack: 1. Bite the bullet, and hire a VA (virtual assistant). You can quickly find a Virtual Assistant (via a WorldWIT E-mail list, through IVAA, the International Virtual Assistants' Association or AssistU.com) to take your growing stack of business cards and type the names and contact details into Excel, ACT!, or any contact manager. 2. Cultivate a behavior of E-mail followup. If you routinely write to new contacts, within a day or two of receiving their business cards, you'll have at least their names and E-mail addresses in Outlook, where Plaxo can do you some good.

If you become an active LinkedIn user, you will soon tire of the standard "boilerplate" LinkedIn invitations, and so will your friends. It is a very good idea to write your own, personalized LinkedIn invitations rather than to use the standard ones with subject lines like "Interesting Business Tool." Those standard LinkedIn invitations are intended for

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people who know nothing about the site. If your contacts are likely to be acquainted with LinkedIn in particular, or social networking sites in general, you may want to switch up your invitation-verbiage.

Don't be Hatin,' or Boilerplatin': LinkedIn Invitations with a Personal Touch As the networking site LinkedIn takes off — with over 6.6 million members as of June, 2006 — users are starting to tire of the standard "boilerplate" invitations (the ones that members use when they want to invite their friends to "connect" on LinkedIn). So, to switch up the verbiage a bit and have some fun, here are some customized LinkedIn invitations in the styles of...

Valley Girl: I'm like, totally using this LinkedIn thing, and it's like, everyone's doing it and if you're like, not connected, you're like, so not even ANYONE. So I'm all "let's connect," and you like only have to hit this one button and stuff, so like do it, and let's GET TO KNOW SOME PEOPLE!!

The Sopranos: So boss, You want we should connect, a what? Dis guy, behind da guy, he knows a guy and he wants we should talk to dis guy, in Jersey, so get connected over here and we'll do dis ting. Bada bing, bada boom. Click on the link. Fuhgeddaboutit. Paulie "Links"

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Haiku: The unconnected person waits for the invite connection. It's here. Join us!

Old Testament: And so it came to pass that the word spread, and the blessings came down upon the people, and spread throughout the nations. And the prophet said, "Let us connect," and one unto the other they connected, they of the first degree and of the second, and lo, all the degrees thereof. And so the people connected, one to another, each according to his needs and his unique selling proposition, and it was good.

Mood Swing: I can't tell you if you still like me. I know you're busy, so don't be mad at me for asking, but do you HATE ME or what? I'm sorry. It's my fault. I'm such a loser. What is your problem? Why are you such a jerk to me? Do you want to CONNECT? Only if you want to. Probably you don't. It's okay. You hate me. I can tell. Do you want to connect though? Click on the link. Okay, don't. Just be your arrogant self. Die.

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Risqué: I saw your profile and I must say, it's spicy...you seem like a person who knows a lot about....life. You're so-accomplished. You've got that smoky air of success about you. I read your profile over and over and tried to picture your resume, and believe me, I did, and I couldn't sleep afterwards. And people are attracted to you, it's obvious. You've connected with a lot of people, haven't you? There's something dangerous about you. I want to connect with you RIGHT NOW — can you feel it?

Mother Goose: Higgledy piggledy, my LinkedIn Bring your whole address book in! Austin, Boston, Rome, Berlin, Globally, mobile-ly, my LinkedIn.

Mom: Oh hello dear, Is this how you do this? Tell me if you get this. Am I doing this right? I want to invite you to-what? This is so complicated. Honey, I just can't keep you with all your fancy Web sites and gadgets. I have to be honest, the digital camera you bought your father for Christmas in 1999 is still in the box. You're such a bright boy. We're so proud of you, sweetheart. What about that girl you mentioned at Aunt Janet's 80th birthday party, are you still seeing her? I don't mean to pry. There was something I was supposed to ask you — oh, yes, do you want to click with me? Clink? Link? Or whatever it's called. Connect. Oh yes, that's it. How silly, to connect with your mother! Do you still listen to Earth, Wind & Fire? You loved them in high school. Love, Mom

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Key Points Discussed Online networking typically involves a set of standard elements, including Profiles and Introductions; and most often happens via membership in one or more social networking sites and/or E-mail discussion groups (aka list-servs). Each social networking site and each list-serv community has its own set of protocols, but some online networking expectations are common to all sites and list-servs. Because online networkers can acquire contacts quickly, a contact management system like Plaxo can be a significant timesaver. And, the more active an online networker becomes, the more he or she should get comfortable with non-standard, personalized outreach messages to other online networkers (regardless of the online networking platform used).

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c h a p t e r

3

Who Are You Online?

Now that you have a feel for two of the major tools that will power your online networking: — social networking sites and E-mail list-servs-that will power your online networking, it's worth thinking about how you want to position yourself online. Your online presence will drive the type and number of contacts you receive, the types of opportunities that will be presented to you, and, over time, the "virtual soapbox" that you will build under your feet. To illustrate what I mean, consider these examples: 1. As a new online networker, you browse Yahoo! Groups and find a number of E-mail lists devoted to politics, one of your favorite topics. You jump into a couple of highly partisan list-servs and immediately become embroiled in a nasty flame war in each one, in which you and your fellow flamer insult and degrade one another for days before being admonished by the moderator. 2. You create a LinkedIn profile using the title "Online Gadfly" to describe yourself, and the subtitle "Goddess of Gab." You include these terms in your E-mail signature, to let people know that you're a big online networker and a fun person.

How might each of these online representations affect your networking results? In the first case, Google searches will pick up your intemperate list-serv battles and display them to anyone searching on your name. Are your nasty political scuffles the first thing you want your prospective networking contacts to read?

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In the second example, your cutesy made-up title and tagline may feel very fun and jaunty to you, but could easily convey a lack of professionalism to a person who doesn't know you. Remember, the words you choose to write about yourself (and then, the words you choose to communicate with other networkers) are typically ALL that a prospective contact CAN know about you. Choose your words carefully! It's critical to consider how you want to be viewed online. Here are some factors to think about, as you consider the development of your online networking persona. You get to choose how to represent yourself, and in that decision process, it's helpful to have a set of dimensions (how formal? how technical?) upon which to base your identity-creation decisions.

Four Parameters for Developing your Online Persona 1. Professional-Personal. Do I want to represent myself — in my LinkedIn profile, my introductions to list-serv members, and in other ways — in a "strictly-business" manner? Do I want to share any personal details, or any aspect of my personality apart from my professional life? Browse LinkedIn or any social networking site, and you'll see profiles that read like résumés; others that read like folksy letters; and everything in between. 2. Functional-Human. One of your decision points will arise when you think about how much of your technical or functional expertise you want to emphasize in your online presence, versus your leadership skills, communication skills, and overall "human" elements. Some networkers prefer to focus on their functional backgrounds, for instance in procurement, product design, or merchandising. Others take the view that their "soft" skills, leadership abilities, management philosophy, and other "human" skills deserve more airtime. 3. Past-Present. A big question for online networkers is how much they want to say about their career histories, versus what they're up to right now. Some online networkers prefer to demonstrate their credibility by emphasizing their degrees, titles, and business accomplishments. Others use their profiles and introductions to talk about their current projects and needs.

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4. Trophies-Self. Some online networkers believe that every syllable and comma they write about themselves must be designed to impress people they come in contact with online. If they feel that way, they'll focus on their awards, commendations and honors. Others would rather use the words available to them to share their world-view, way of thinking, and good ideas with the networking public. Your choice.

Consider these two, very different E-mail list-serv introductions:

Dear folks, Hello! I have just joined the group, and I'm glad to meet you. I'm Anna Britten, a graphic designer in Santa Rosa. I'm an avid gardener and mother of Charles and Emma, four and two years old. I love "The Sopranos" and I'm a soprano myself, in the Santa Rosa Women's Choir. Hope to enjoy some great networking with all of you! Cheers, Anna

Dear group members, I am pleased to make your online acquaintance. Gerald Taylor alerted me to the existence of this group, of which I had not previously been aware. My background is primarily in corporate litigation, with fourteen years in a major San Francisco firm and four years in my own practice. I attended the University of Kentucky for my undergraduate program and attained my Juris Doctor at the Kent School of Law. I am originally from Elkhart, Indiana, and am active in a number of legal societies. Very truly yours, Keith Maynard

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Do you get a different feeling from each of these introductions? Most likely, you do. Getting comfortable with your online persona — which, of course, can change over time, or even several times a day as you wish — is important. The thing about the words you write online is that they are published, or broadcast, to large numbers of people! Maybe on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog; but whomever you are, online, a lot of people will know it. So now you're in the online networking arena. You've joined a social networking site — we'll use LinkedIn as an example — and one or more E-mail list-servs. Now, what do you do to make your online networking go? 1. Establish contacts. 2. Offer to help. 3. Focus on relationships, not transactions.

First, you want to make some contacts. Post an introduction, at the appropriate time, to each list-serv you belong to. Download the LinkedIn toolbar to help you determine which of your existing contacts (people from your Outlook address book, that is) are already using LinkedIn, and invite each of them to connect to you. Use the Find Colleagues on LinkedIn to find people you used to work with at past job assignments, and invite them to connect to you, also. One great way to jump into online networking is with offers of help. Online networking is not only, or even primarily, a set of activities for securing help with your job search or in your business development efforts. When you find people online, it's vital to think about how you can help them. Once you have an idea of what a person might need, you have a great reason to contact him or her! Let's say that you are browsing the LinkedIn database one day, and you find an Internet marketing consultant in your city. You would love to reach out to this person, because you're bored to tears as an internal IT person at your current employer, and would be thrilled to learn more about Internet marketing. You can write a message to this person (using the Request Contact feature, which will pass through intermediate contacts of yours to reach this interesting person) like this:

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Dear Shandra, I found your profile on LinkedIn and was impressed by your background. I would be very grateful to make contact with you, via phone or E-mail, if you have a few moments. I am an IT manager at XYZ Scientific here in town, and I'd love to know more about your business. I would be happy to help you make new contacts at my company and among my other associates, and perhaps you could educate me a little in your area of expertise. Thanks very much. Yours, Adam Norlin

It's worth taking the time to do a little research, and spend a bit of time thinking about how you could be of service to each new prospective online contact. Otherwise, you are like an old-fashioned encyclopedia salesperson, approaching each new person with a pitch: want to buy? Want to buy? This is unseemly, unlikely to be effective, and likely to turn off prospective contacts. It's also counter to the idea of transformational networking, which is based on relationships for their own sake, rather than the fulfillment of one networker's goals. If I had a nickel for every online networker who has contacted me, saying "You could help me in my job search!" or "I was hoping you know someone at Sony Pictures," I'd be a very wealthy person. That is not networking, and it's not polite. Think about it: in the "real" world, would it be polite to approach a total stranger with a request for help? Of course not. You can't do it online either, if you want to get results and if you want to cultivate trusted relationships. Start with your offer of help — your best, educated guess as to how you could assist a prospective networking contact — and build from there.

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More Ways to Build Your Online Persona If you have created a LinkedIn (or other social networking) profile, and cultivated an active presence on one or more E-mail list-servs that suit your tastes, you are off to a good start in your online networking. But there are more ways to build a robust online presence.

Photos and Files

Yahoo! Groups, the big-kahuna E-mail list-serv hosting site we mentioned earlier, allows users to upload files and photos to the site and to create databases for the use of members. These are owner-controlled features, so if you're a lowly user of a given E-mail list, you won't have the power to turn these features on. But many list owners understand the value of allowing list members to upload content, and so they'll create a photo album and file-storage areas to allow members to share this kind of content with one another. A group's photo album might include photos of its members, or other photos of interest to the group. For instance, I maintain a Yahoo! Groups for alumni of a company I used to work for, and members upload photos from the old days, often with the caption "Does anybody remember this guy's name?" Some E-mail groups that have thousands of users, also store thousands of photos and a zillion pages of files. This is a great service for users, because they can access these photos and files from anywhere, by virtue of the wonderful world of Internet access.

Alumni Groups

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Here is another great way to build your online persona. Get involved, or re-involved, with your college alumni group(s). Most universities and other institutions of higher education maintain alumni databases to allow alums to connect to one another. Why not take advantage of that? Contact your alma mater's alumni relations office to get whatever usernames and passwords you need to access the alumni Web site and get connected. If there is an opportunity for you to create a current Profile, do it!

Chapter 3: Who Are You Online?

Some forward-thinking business enterprises also maintain alumni sites and resources. One of the oldest corporate-alumni groups, the Grey Eagles, was formed even before the dot-com era to support former employees of the tech firm Data General. Some corporate alumni groups are ad-hoc, alumni-driven groups, while some are funded and maintained by the employer. Either way, corporate alumni groups are a resource not to be dismissed, even if you worked for the company twenty years ago.

Online Forums

We've already talked about social networking sites like LinkedIn and OpenBC, and about E-mail list-servs like the WorldWIT chapters and the E-mail lists found on Yahoo! Groups. But there is another, substantial area of online conversation, called online forums. Online forums are strictly online (there's no E-mail interface, except that some forums will "ping" you via E-mail when a new post appears on a forum you've joined). Many "enthusiast" sites host online forums for their members and visitors. In an online forum, you can read the posts that other people have written, and respond to them, and you can write and publish posts of your own. You can find online forums on every topic under the sun, from the latest hit television show to breast-feeding babies. And there are plenty of business-networking online forums around, which you may find useful to your other online networking efforts. Online forums can be a great way to get quick answers to your questions and to learn more about a given area (say, venture funding or guerilla marketing). In my experience, online forums often suffer from their "drive-by" aspect; because users can stop by, post a message and dash off, there's no guarantee that the person to whom you're writing (e.g., the person who posted a question half an hour ago) is ever coming back to the forum to read the answers to his or her question. So there can be a diminishing-returns effect to becoming involved in a forum discussion. But each forum is different: take a look, and make your own judgments. There are way, way too many business sites hosting online forums to list them, but the most common place to find an online forum is under the community link on the business site's homepage. Here are a few useful ones:

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Gather (www.Gather.com) is a combination Social Networking/content site, and another place to build and extend your online presence. Gather.com membership is free, and includes a profile, a photo and a place to upload articles and photos. Members connect to one another and share comments on one another's stories, poems and photos; users can also create special-interest groups and participate in special online "events" and contests. Frappr (www.Frappr.com) is a group-maps site, where members can join and place themselves as "pins" on existing member maps, or create their own maps. You can create a map to identify the current whereabouts of your old summer-camp-mates, or to locate sorority members dispersed around the globe. Frappr maps are free, and more exposure for your group on Frappr is never a bad thing! Ezinearticles (www.Ezinearticles.com) is a site where authors can submit articles for inclusion in online publications and E-mail newsletters. Ezinearticles doesn't pay authors for their submissions, but the benefit of submitting articles is that an author's search engine results will benefit from the extra exposure in two ways (1: when the articles are picked up by online publishers and re-used, and 2: the articles themselves residing on www.ezinearticles.com). Included with each article is the author's bio and a link to his or her Web site. Blogs As much as a Chamber of Commerce event, a blog is a networking tool. Bloggers, by extension, are networkers! People who blog meet other online citizens, and just as importantly, create an individual online presence that includes their wisdom, observations, musings, and advice. Blogger.com, the biggest of the free blogging sites, is easy to use and popular among bloggers and blog-visitors alike. Your blog can link to your LinkedIn profile and vice versa. Well-written, relevant blogs attract visitors who can comment on your posts and/or link to your blog, creating a bigger virtual soapbox for the blogger/networker. If you're writing a lot of content anyway (on list-servs, or as comments on other people's blogs) you might as well take the plunge, and put that content to work for you under your own online-networking flag.

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Key Points Discussed It requires a shift in your thinking to realize that who you are online is a function of how you represent yourself in your Profiles on social networking sites; your introductions on E-mail list-servs; and your outreach to other online networkers. There is no "you" online except the one that you build, site by list and E-mail message by E-mail message. So deciding who you want to be, and how you want to be perceived, online, is an important decision process. Once you have constructed your online persona, you can begin to interact with other online networkers, remembering to focus on your networking contact's needs rather than your own, and on the relationship rather than on transactions. By now, I hope you've taken these three steps to get your online networking efforts underway: 1. Joined LinkedIn or another social networking site, created a Profile, and invited a few contacts to connect with you. 2. Joined a WorldWIT chapter and/or another E-mail list (found on Yahoo! Groups or elsewhere) and posted an introduction. 3. Taken a look at Gather, Frappr, one or several business-related online forums, Ezinearticles and/or Blogger, to see if these tools make sense for you.

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c h a p t e r

4

When Worlds Collide

As you become established in the online networking sphere, wonderful things will happen. People will reach out to you to share ideas and make mutual connections. If you are active in the online networking groups you belong to, you'll quickly learn that you have to be a little stingy with your time. If you got on the phone and spent half an hour talking to every person you met online, you'd never get any work done! So your online networking speeds up the ‘intake’ and acquisition of new contacts. And lots of good things can happen with and through your online connections, even if you never talk on the phone with them or meet face to face. But the fact is that when it is practical, it is enormously beneficial to move some of your online contacts to the real world, by talking on the phone with them or meeting them in person. This chapter, “When Worlds Collide,” addresses a set of topics associated with migrating an online networking contact into your ‘real life.’ If you use LinkedIn or another social networking site fairly avidly (meaning that you're responding to requests from other members; actively inviting at least two or three of your friends and colleagues per week to connect to you; and using the database to find and reach out to other users who may share business interests with you), you should begin to accumulate a respectable set of contacts. Likewise, if you're beginning to speak up and participate in E-mail list-servs, you will likely have fellow list-members approach you about collaborating in business somehow, or just getting to know one another better.

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You can take that next-step networking activity offline, by scheduling a live phone call, or (if you're in the same part of the world) a face-to-face meeting. I hate to mention it, but I must: if you don't know someone except through the Internet, meet him or her at a well-lit, public place! Don't invite an otherwise-unknown-to-you online networking contact to your home, no matter what. For the same reason, it's a good idea not to post personal information about yourself (the fact that you work from home, for instance) on public forums.

Networking Abroad One the most wicked-cool aspects to online networking is that you can cultivate relationships with people who live anywhere in the world — anywhere that people have Internet access, at least. I get messages almost every day from people on different continents from the one (North America) where I live. Often, I have to stop and ask myself "what country is this from?" because I won't instantly recognize a domain suffix on my correspondent's E-mail address — for instance, the suffix .ge, which is used in the Republic of Georgia. How do you make international, online networking contacts? One great place to start is the user group MyLinkedInPowerForum, associated with (but not owned or operated by) the Social Networking site LinkedIn. Vincent Wright, the owner and moderator of the MyLinkedInPowerForum group, is one of the gurus of online networking. You can join this group, hosted at Yahoo! Groups, for free, by sending a blank message to [email protected]. MyLinkedInPowerForum is full of international networkers! If you don't mind the long-distance phone charges (or if you use Skype, a voice-over-IP or VOIP application, to keep those charges down) you can quickly meet a new friend in a country you might not be able to place on the map.

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Taking it Offline It is fairly easy to strike up a conversation online. If you find that a conversation on a list-serv has become personal, that is, if it's just you and other list-serv member dominating the conversation, that's a good time to move the exchange out of the public sphere and into a one-on-one space. That's easy — just write to the other member directly, suggesting "Shall we correspond some more by E-mail, or schedule a phone call?" As we've said before, collecting data is the booby prize. Amassing a large number of LinkedIn contacts or a hundred virtual business cards is not a valuable exercise, unless those contacts and business cards are attached to people who would welcome your call or E-mail message. So it's important not only to collect contacts, but also to cultivate them. That happens by taking the time to make contact with people (every single contact, or people you're especially interested in getting to know better) on a one-to-one basis. You can do this by phone, by E-mail, or in person. You can write to one of your contacts and suggest a quick phone call or (if you're local to one another) a face-to-face meeting. Or, you can correspond by way of personal E-mails between you, but I'd call that a distant third choice over a face-to-face meeting (best solution, if it's feasible), or a live phone call.

Trust + Ideas = Action Many online networkers get stymied at this stage. "Okay," they say, "I've got some great online connections. I've corresponded with people from all over the world. Now, how do I accomplish my goals through this network — and how do I make money?" I get this question every day. Here's the formula I recommend: Pick a person in your network that you'd like to know better. Before you reach out to suggest a phone call or a live meeting, think about this person's business. What do you know about the contact you'd like to know better, and have intersections of business interests with, that would allow you to make an educated guess about how you could help him (or her)?

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It would be very unfortunate to call up a person and say, "Here's exactly how you can help me!" And yet this happens every day.

My formula for converting online networking activity into business results is: Trust + Ideas = Action

Notice that the formula starts with Trust, or the strength of the relationship that you are creating. Trust springs from your focused attention, good will, and the investment in creating a human connection. If I don't care about you, I'm not going to help you, and vice versa. Your first call to a new online networking contact — the one where you say, "We've corresponded via a few list-servs, or found one another on LinkedIn — and maybe there are some ways we could work together," — should focus on building trust. If you make a business deal with a new contact on the first call or in the first meeting, that's great. But you shouldn't plan on it! That would be fairly unlikely, in fact. It's much more likely that what you'll get from that first one-on-one phone call, or face-to-face meeting, is something else. If you're lucky, you may even achieve three wonderful things in that interaction: 1. You will understand your networking associate's business needs well enough to be able to help him or her with his or her agenda (and vice versa!) 2. You will have built a trusting relationship that would give you a level of comfort about introducing your new friend to friends of yours, and vice versa. 3. And if you are lucky, you two may have identified mutual business interests or "intersections" between your networks, areas of expertise, or current projects. Then, you can proceed to make these intersections work for you!

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Too often, networkers go into networking interactions hoping to come home with a sale — a new client, a new job, or funding for their business. That's a sales process. That comes later. Your first interactions with new networking contacts are early-stage marketing meetings. No one will buy from you until you lay the groundwork, a combination of facts (what you do, what you've done before, what you're after now) and emotions (how you present yourself, how trustworthy you seem, how much time you've invested in learning about your new contact's profile and business, etc.) Your hope in meeting a new networking associate is to build trust and to generate ideas. If you come home from a networking meeting having done those two things, you're in great shape. What happens then? You two may be so overwhelmed by the business potential between you that you immediately schedule another meeting. Or you may return home scratching your heads, thinking, "Nice person, but I'm not sure there's anything we can immediately put together between us." Or you may even think, "Yuck! I have no desire to see that person, ever again." Keeping in mind the formula: Trust + Ideas = Action, you’ll quickly learn to discern what levels of trust and ideas equate to action benefical to your business.

Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #2 A man named Dan reached out to me via an online posting. He called me at my office. Some people don't like to be called by phone, out of the blue, by their online contacts. I love it. I love to put a voice with an E-mail address. So I took his call right away. It turned out that our company was filling a job opening, and this gentleman was interested in applying for the job. We spoke for about fifteen minutes. He said, "Let's get together!" All other things being equal, I might have said, "Why don't you send me a résumé, and I'll review it." But I was impressed by the gentleman's pluck — he called me out of the blue, he had a good story to tell, and he asked good questions about the job. So I said, "Okay." We set up a coffee date for about a week in the future.

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A week later, I pulled up in my car to the coffee shop. I thought, "Oh no, I've got the wrong day." No one at the coffee shop seemed to be looking to meet anyone. Each coffee shop patron was immersed in a book or in a laptop. In fact, there were about ten men in the place, each at his own table, each completely engrossed. Well, I thought, if Dan is here, I will get his attention. So I made a circuit of the coffee shop, walking slowly around from table to table, looking intently at each person. But no one looked up. "Nope," I thought, "I've got the wrong day." I took a seat at one of the tables, still looking around continually, in case Dan arrived late. No luck. After ten minutes, I thought, "it would be a shame if Dan were here, and I missed him." So I made another circuit (this is a very small coffee shop, mind you) looking closely at each patron. At this point, if Dan were in the shop, the only way I might have found him would have been to tap each patron on the shoulder and ask, "Are you Dan?" "Are YOU Dan?" No way, I thought. He's not here. So I drove back to my office. Just as I walked in the door, my officemate called out, "Liz! Dan is on the phone!" "Oh, did we mix up the date?" I asked. "No," replied my co-worker, "he is at the coffee shop. He says he was there the whole time." "No way!" I said. "I was looking all over — did he ever look up from his book?" My colleague stayed on the phone with Dan for a few minutes. First off, he wanted to know if I could drive back to the coffee shop. He was surprised and a little miffed that I hadn't spotted him. "I gave her my physical description," he said (referring to me). Yeah — a white, 50-ish man. Ha ha! There were ten of those in the coffee shop. Evidently, Dan's standard is "If you want to find me, ask me my name." If he was in that coffee shop, 'he never once glanced up from his book or laptop.

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Now, look. There were ten men in that coffee shop and one woman, me. Dan was applying for a job with me, and had been to my Web site, where my picture is on almost every page. I had never seen a picture of him. I stood at the front door, made two circuits of the place and peered at every coffee drinker in the joint. He never glanced up. That's crazy! It's rude! If you want to meet a person you don't know, you have to meet him or her halfway. Dan sat nose-in-book and waited for me to accost him. That's out. He did not get another interview, or, of course, the job. You broadcast a lot when you network, online or offline. Dan sent out signals saying, "I am lofty, you seek me out." That's not a great stance to adopt when you are job-hunting, or at any other time. What's funny is that he asked whether I could drive back and meet him at the coffee shop, after he had ignored me for twenty minutes the first time I was there! "But I drove an hour to get here," he said. Maybe you could use your hour of driving-home time to think about how you might have handled that meeting better!

Writing to Strangers We have focused on Social Networking sites like LinkedIn, and on E-mail list-servs like WorldWIT and the many Yahoo! Groups discussion groups. Another way to build your online network is to write to people you don't know, and aren't connected to on LinkedIn or elsewhere. You may become aware of someone like this through his or her profile in a magazine article, or by seeing this person speak at a conference, or in some other way. It's a media-soaked world, so we get bombarded by names and histories of people every day. Sometimes, the story is so compelling that you think, "I would like to meet that person!" There is no downside to seeking out a person in this way. If they don't want to correspond with you, they won't. But you haven't lost anything by asking. However, there is a good way and a bad way to approach someone.

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When you write to a person you don't know, you should demonstrate three things: 1. Respect for his or her time and obligations 2. An understanding of his or her expertise 3. An appreciation of the need to explain your purpose

Whereas in an online networking forum like LinkedIn or an E-mail list-serv, you can assume that people expect (and hope) to meet one another, in the case where you write to someone unknown to you, out of the blue, you have to say why you're writing. So you might write to an author and say "I loved your book, and I have a question for you, if you have a moment." Or you can write to a person who was profiled in your local business publication, expressing an interest in talking or even meeting for coffee. But you have to say something about yourself, and explain why meeting you might be worth this person's time — because he or she doesn't know you from Adam!

How do you find contact information for someone you read about or learn about online? You Google his or her name! Or, you use LinkedIn to find the person, and use intermediate LinkedIn connections to write to him or her. These days, it is very easy to find contact information for almost anyone who is in the business world in an industrialized nation, particularly if he or she has even been published, or speaks at conferences, or is active in industry associations. This chapter, When Worlds Collide, is concerned with moving online connections offline and vice versa. Here are two more ideas for helping to reinforce your online relationships with people you've met via other means (in an association, by working together at a past job, etc.) LinkedInGroups is a feature of LinkedIn that allows existing groups (alumni organizations, clubs and societies) to create identities for themselves on the LinkedIn site, to allow members to easily reach other group members and to facilitate networking among members.

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If you have an offline group, such as a professional association or a corporate alumni club that you network with, the group can join LinkedIn through the LinkedIn Groups program and have easy access to one another. Members can identify other group members as they locate them while browsing on LinkedIn, and, depending on the group settings chosen by the group administrator, may be able to reach other group members without intermediate introductions.

Broadcasting

As you develop an online network of contacts, you may wish to further communicate with the group members by means of broadcast communications. The Internet makes this easy! LinkedIn's Profile Update feature allows you to alert your first-degree network (the set of people who are connected to you directly on LinkedIn) of a significant event in your life, like a promotion or a new job. E-mail newsletters are another way that networkers keep in touch with and inform their networks of news, or share expertise with people who are connected to them. If you produce and broadcast an online newsletter, you can maintain relationships with people that you don't see or talk to often. But you have to ask for permission to include a networking contact on your E-mail newsletter list — and be sure to include an unsubscribe link on every single issue. If your mailing list is small (e.g. under 100 people), you can use your E-mail application to send your E-mail newsletter. If your list is larger, there are a large number of newsletter-production-and-distribution vendors that will make it easy to produce, publish and archive your and NetNewsDesk newsletter. IMN (www.imninc.com) (www.netnewsdesk.com) are two popular sites that offer these services.

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Key Points Discussed It is easy for active online networkers to begin to perceive their online networks as somehow existing only in cyberspace. The fact is that your online networks exist in real space too, but not necessarily in your city (and you'd be hard-pressed to get all those folks together in one room in any city). But it's natural and positive to begin to move your online network offline over time (and vice versa). Online networking is an especially great way to become aware of people you wouldn't otherwise know existed, to then contact them about face-to-face meetings (or phone calls) offline. And, online networking (e.g. via LinkedIn Groups) enables easier communication with people you've already known in three dimensions.

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5

Cultivating Your Network

It is exciting and fun to start networking online and meeting interesting and multi-faceted new people every day. It can be addictive, though, and some networkers get so caught up in their online activities that they lose sight of their original purpose. As fun as it is to chat with people on other continents and to learn about them, initial contacts are not especially useful unless you also cultivate your network. We already addressed the LinkedIn Profile Update function that allows LinkedIn users to let their networks know when something has changed in their LinkedIn profile. This is an exciting feature, and one that some users find easy to abuse. Remember that your Profile Update will show up in your contacts' E-mail in-box like this: Jane Smith has Updated her Profile. If you overuse the function, you'll begin to resemble the fabled Boy Who Cried Wolf: people won't want to open those messages about your profile updates, if they've been burned before. Save your LinkedIn Profile Updates for those really important changes like a new job or a book contract. And, you must let your contacts know (in a brief message attached to your updated Profile link) what has changed! Don't force them to read through your whole Profile to try and spot the news in your life.

Plaxo

The use of Plaxo is a mechanical but still important way to stay in touch with your network, because if you can't reach a person, you can't network with him or her. Plaxo allows you to let your network know when you've changed jobs or had some other news in your life, too.

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People network online, in large part, to be introduced over time to people whose friendship can assist them in achieving their goals.

Something of Value

A great way to stay in touch with your network is to share worthwhile tools, content and resources with them. A quick note that says "I thought you'd enjoy this article" is a great way to add value to your contacts and to keep them aware of their connection to you. But remember this: it's very important to distinguish between one-on-one and broadcast communications. If I'm part of your network, I don't want to get a note from you that says "Liz, I thought you'd enjoy this article" and then to find out that you produced that note using a Mail Merge feature, and that you sent the same article to 1,000 people! It's impolite to address people in the form of a personal message, when in fact you are broadcasting the same information to many people. It's a misuse of your trusted relationship. Don't do it! Apart from articles that you find interesting, here are some other bits of value that you can share with your network members: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introductions

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Upcoming events (industry conferences, tele-seminars, etc.) New research studies Quick reviews of books you've found worth reading Resources you've become aware of, such as new networking sites, high-value E-mail groups, or other tools.

Introductions are at the core of online networking. People network online, in large part, to be introduced over time to people whose friendship can assist them in achieving their goals. So introductions are critical for online networkers. And introductions have their own set of rules and protocols. Here are ten Do's and Don'ts you should follow.

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Ten Do's and Don'ts for Making, Accepting, and Following up on Online-Networking Introductions 1. Do not make introductions lightly. When your teenage babysitter's boyfriend mentions that he is looking for an entry-level marketing job, your mind may jump instantly to your friend who is a VP at a consumer-products company. But before you introduce the young man to your friend, you should ask yourself this question: "Do I have the relationship with this VP that would entitle me to ask him a favor?" Because that's exactly what you are doing. An introduction is a favor. You are asking your friend to take time out to consider this young man for a job. You are expending "relationship points'' by making the request. Maybe your young friend is so exceptional (or your babysitter is) or you have the close friendship with the VP that would make such a request a slam-dunk. Or maybe not. People online tend to make casual introductions way too casually, and that is a violation of etiquette. 2. Do explain the reason for your introduction. I love to meet new people, but I sure hate those E-mail messages that say "Dear Liz and Priscilla, you two should meet!" Excuse me for asking, but why? You need to share enough about each person in your introduction-process to justify the introduction in the first place. 3. Do not make promises, or even strong suggestions, as you make introductions. "Jane is job-hunting, and would love your thoughts on her approach" is one thing, but "Jane is job-hunting, and I told her you could get her an interview at your company" is something else entirely. It's enough of a request to make an introduction at all; don't add expectations into it! 4. Do not jump into an E-mail introduction that may be unwelcome. If you have any doubt at all about whether an introduction would be welcome, don't make it. In other words, if you think that perhaps your friend Carl would be open to meeting the job-seeker Amy, then don't make an E-mail introduction between them. Call Carl, instead, and ask him whether he would be open to receiving your introduction to Amy. Very often, Carl will say, "thanks for asking me, and the truth is, I'm very busy, and can't really help Amy much at this stage." You'll avoid damaging your relationship

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with Carl by avoiding making an introduction that was not going to be welcomed by the recipient. 5. Do keep track of the introductions you've made. As we said earlier, an introduction is itself a request for a favor (please spend the time that it will take to focus on my friend's need). Don't go back to the same people with introductions, over and over. 6. Do let your contacts know if you're feeling overwhelmed by the introductions they're making, of other people to you. If you're slammed with work and don't have bandwidth to assist a job seeker or advise another networker, be upfront about it. 7. Do act quickly on the introductions you receive. If you can help, do it quickly; if you can't, let the person know, also quickly. You'll be better off dealing with incoming introductions quickly, whether your help is significant (getting a person an interview) or more modest (giving him or her the name of a person in HR to contact). 8. Do not make introductions for people you don't know. LinkedIn is unique in that it enables users to introduce friends-of-friends to people they know. People understand that your introduction of a LinkedIn user is mediated by the system and by the people who are more closely connected to the introduction — requester than you are. But outside of LinkedIn, you shouldn't make introductions to your valued contacts for people you don't know. If you do, you're signaling that the "juice" (networking brownie points) you hope to cultivate with a new contact is more important to you than the time and attention of one of your trusted contacts. This may not be your true feeling — maybe you're just trying to help a person, whom you happen to have just met. But you need to keep in mind the bandwidth of your good friends, too. 9. Do thank people who accept your introductions. It's annoying to be introduced to a person who needs help (in my case, often this means help with a job search) and then help the person, and never hear again from the person who made the introduction. If my friend Angie introduces me to Joaquin and asks me to help Joaquin with his resume, then I've helped Joaquin for sure. But

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mostly, I've done a favor for my friend Angie, because she asked me to and because that's what friends are for. Angie should say thanks, too. 10.Do not build your online networking persona as the person who can make introductions or your "real" friends will start to avoid you. There are many ways to build your networking credibility online, and the ability to make introductions is only one of them. If you become an "introduction slut" and involve all of your friends in your day-to-day online networking sojourns, you will lose all your old friends quickly. Your valued contacts should be treated as such, and not as Pokemon trading cards to be tossed about lightly as social currency, and low-level currency at that. If you become known to your associates as a person who'll give their names and contact information away at the drop of a hat, expect to lose friends quickly.

Key Points Discussed There's little value in knowing, or being connected to, scads of people online, if the relationships never develop past the "great to know you" stage. Cultivating your network by establishing mutual trust and a shared knowledge of networkers' needs and capabilities is critical. You can do that by exchanging value with your online networking contacts; being responsible about making and requesting introductions; and, over time, becoming a trusted advisor, sounding board, and networking conduit for your online colleagues.

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6

Online Networking Etiquette

Something funny happens to some people when they begin to network online. Everything they learned at their mother's knee, in kindergarten, and on the playground goes out the window. People forget how to behave! Online networking is hard enough, because you lose the cues embedded in tone of voice, facial expression, and body language that tell you how your message is being received. In online networking, you have to overdo polite behavior. Otherwise, you will make enemies instead of friends online! We have already touched on some of the most important rules for polite online networking. Here's a recap: 1. Think of the person first, not the transaction you want to make happen. Networking is about connecting with people. Getting a job, gaining a new client, and other business goals are outcomes of the relationships you cultivate. 2. Always reach out to a new person with an offer of help, not a request for help. 3. Make introductions thoughtfully and carefully, and always say "thank you" when your introductions are accepted. 4. Do not confuse your trusted contacts with a built-in audience. If you send a broadcast communication to your network, do not disguise it as a personal message! 5. Be conscious in your networking. If you're meeting a person in a coffee shop, stay alert enough to spot him or her on arrival! Networking is about outreach. Don't broadcast "You reach out to me."

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6. Don't spam people. If you write to a perfect stranger to suggest making a connection, explain why you're writing and demonstrate that you know something about the background of the person you're approaching.

LinkedIn has its own set of etiquette rules. When you make a contact request, you should explain why you are approaching a person. A contact request is the correct tool to use in making an overture to a person you don't know. Connecting, on LinkedIn, is creating a little cable between you and another person — a cable that other LinkedIn users can use to make introductions, find one another, hunt for jobs and so on. "You should make contact with a person before asking "Would you like to connect to me?" via a contact request, if he or she is a perfect stranger. Otherwise, you're saying this: I don't know you! Oh well! You don't know me! Want to share networks? I want access to yours! It's unseemly. Don't do it.

If you can't be bothered to keep your profile current, why should another person bother to engage with you?

Ten LinkedIn Do's and Don'ts If you are job-seeking, you need to join LinkedIn, an essential job-search tool. If you're not on a job search but you're into online networking; or want to acquire new partners or clients; or otherwise want to rev up your networking activity level, you should likewise become a LinkedIn user, in my view. All that being said, there are some iron-clad rules for polite and professional use of the network. Here's my Top Ten list for LinkedIn Do's and Don'ts:

1. Do connect to your "real-world" friends. I'm amazed by how many LinkedIn users join up, create a profile, and immediately set to work inviting all sorts of online strangers to join their networks. Sure, it's fun to browse the LinkedIn database and look up people you might want to know better… but what about your friends

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back in three-dimensional space? The first thing to do as a new LinkedIn user — after creating a rockin' profile for yourself — is to invite your true-blue friends and former workmates to join your network. There are three steps in this process: Step 1.

Download your Outlook address book so that LinkedIn can find your friends who are already members.

Step 2.

Use the Find Colleagues and Find Classmates functions to synch up with people you know from school and past jobs; and

Step 3.

Invite "real" friends who aren't already LinkedIn users to join the network — you'll be helping them get connected at the same time you grow your own network.

2. Don't become an "invitation spammer." It's tempting to start sending "connect to me" invitations to every Tom, Dick and Sally you find on LinkedIn, but it's bad manners. If you want to reach out to someone you've spotted who has an enticing profile, send the person a contact request rather than an invitation to join your network. A contact request, to use an offline networking analogy, is like an invitation for a coffee date. An invitation to connect is like asking someone to go steady. Unless you know a person already, don't spam him or her with a "want to start recommending me to people, and vice versa?" invitation — it's creepy.

3. Do unto others... It's astounding that a person would send out connect-to-me invitations while proclaiming on his or her profile that no new connection invitations will be accepted. Talk about all take and no give! There are other LinkedIn users who set up a profile and make connections, and then specify on their profiles that they won't act on requests to forward (a key piece of LinkedIn's value). These messages say, I want to be on this site and get its value, but I don't want to deal with other people's requests. A modern-day Dante would design a special, uncomfortable, and crowded level of hell for these folks: no pits of fire, but perhaps a zone where all

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connections are dial-up, cell phones can't hold a signal, and no one helps you with anything: retribution for the me-first approach to online networking that you showed in your most recent incarnation on Earth.

4. Don't make assumptions about your own irresistibility. Connection invitations should state clearly why you expect your invitee to link up with you — for instance, because you serve on the same fund-raising committee or because your daughters are best friends in the fifth grade. With so many activities crowding a typical businessperson's schedule and so many people in the mix, it's easy for people to forget how they know you. Likewise, even contact requests should state your case as plainly as possible. A message that says "May I call you? We could collaborate", is not the world's strongest pitch. People are incredibly busy — if you're job-seeking, or trolling for new clients, you may lose sight of the fact that a person needs a compelling reason to even spend ten minutes on the phone with you. It's helpful to remember what I call the Happy Life theory of networking: when you reach out to a stranger, that person is presumably leading a happy and fulfilling life without the benefit of knowing you. It's not enough to say "I'll buy you lunch!", or the online equivalent of that offer; a $25 lunch (or a scintillating phone conversation with you) just might not be as hard to pass up as you believe. So lay it out there: here's what I can do for you, or here's what I need, or both.

5. Do keep your profile current. A pox on the person who lets her LinkedIn profile languish! If you can't be bothered to keep your profile current, why should another person bother to engage with you? If I receive a contact request, jump over to the requester's profile, and find that its details don't match what's in the requester's E-mail message, I'm already underwhelmed. Bonus: when you update your profile, you can send a one-click blast message to let your entire first-degree network know about your news. Note: please don't abuse this feature! Reserve profile — update blasts for news on the

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order of a job promotion, book launch or appointment to a national commission,. as opposed to news items like "I have started my PMP certification class."

6. Don't confuse quantity for quality. If I were a recruiter, I'd build the biggest network I could, on LinkedIn or otherwise. After all, there's zero downside to being able to view, and reach, a massive number of candidates when your job is locating talent. But for the rest of us, it's easy to get the notions "a big network" and "a strong network" confused. The question to ask yourself is "Could I recommend this person, and could he recommend me?" If not, the principal value in any individual LinkedIn connection will be your ability to view his network (and vice versa). That's not a bad thing, but it would be a shame to mistake that kind of visibility for influence. Amassing connections can become a kind of addiction, but withdrawal will kick in when these near-strangers begin to ask you to vouch for them to your dearest friends.

7. Don't pass along questionable requests. I got religion on this item in an instant last summer, when a fellow asked me to send a friend of mine a spammy invitation to his business conference. "I can't do it," I wrote, "it's purely a marketing message." The gentleman's return message essentially ripped my head off, affirming my initial gut reaction that his request was an improper one. Don't hesitate to stand up for yourself and for your friends when sketchy requests come down the pike (and they will). If you pass along every bit of dreck that finds you, your trusted friends will start to doubt you, and that's a far worse fate than having to write to another LinkedIn user, "I'm sorry, but I don't feel comfortable passing this on."

8. Don't abuse the Find Colleagues feature. LinkedIn's Find Colleagues feature allows you to find old workmates and send unmediated connection requests to them, a boon if you've lost their E-mail addresses over the years. Unfortunately, it's easy to abuse the

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feature by listing false employers or dates of employment on your profile. What can we say about this? If you believe in the wheel of karma, avoid the temptation to claim employers and employment dates you're not entitled to.

9. Do join the PowerForum. Newbie LinkedIn users have lots of questions, and a great place to get answers is the user group called MyLinkedInPowerForum. Send a blank E-mail message to [email protected] to join the group and get LinkedIn (and general) networking advice. MLPF founder Vincent Wright is a helpful guide and mentor to LinkedIn users all over the world can virtually guarantee that you'll learn something useful from the Forum's daily conversation.

10.Do disconnect from bad apples when you need to. Finally, it's worth noting that LinkedIn gives you the ability to disconnect from users if you find that the connection no longer works for you. If you're plagued by inappropriate requests or other annoyances from one of your connections, you can cut the cord and save yourself from recurring headaches. Some people just don't get the notion of an online community with standards and norms; and it's not your job to teach them how to behave. Just move on.

E-mail list-servs have etiquette rules, too. In fact, some E-mail list-servs have very specific standards, and members can be "sanctioned" or “banished” for bad behavior. I myself was kicked out of one E-mail group for failing to post messages frequently enough. You must find out the rules of any E-mail group that you join, if you want to network effectively in it.

Here are some specific etiquette rules for E-mail list-servs:

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Ten Etiquette Rules for E-mail List-Servs 1. Read the posting guidelines, if they are published. If not, watch the conversation on the list for a few days before posting a message, to make sure that your post will be welcome. 2. If you're in doubt about what to post, write to the group Moderator or Owner to check. 3. Don't self-promote in your messages. It's considered bad form. 4. Don't denigrate another person or his or her observations on a list-serv. If you take exception to something that another member wrote (even if he or she wrote about you!) and you really feel the urge to address that, write to the person directly (off-list). 5. Don't write to the entire list when your message is appropriate for one member. It's very annoying to read on a public E-mail list, "Nice to meet you Julie, want to talk next week?" Hundreds or thousands of people are reading this message, so why not take the conversation to a more private place? 6. Snip before you send! When you receive the daily mail from an E-mail list-serv (either an individual message, or a digest of compiled messages) and you reply to the message by hitting Reply, the whole trailing previous message or digest will be posted along with your reply. Snip off that trailing, old information before posting your message, to save all the list members from having to read what they've already read once, twice or multiple times before. (On WorldWIT lists, which are closely moderated, trailing messages and digests aren't a problem.) 7. Don't spam your fellow list-members. It is very bad form, bad manners, and almost certainly a violation of the list's membership guidelines to "harvest" or "poach" fellow members' E-mail addresses for your own private list. Only respond to fellow members on the topic that they themselves posted about, or a related topic (like "you and I both do E-mail marketing, and both

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live in Pittsburgh; want to have coffee?") Unrelated, unsolicited messages to fellow list members are simply spam. 8. Do give a context and a "reason for action" when you make a request of your fellow list-serv members. For instance, if you are in need of a contact at Avon, say why in your request: "I heard about a Marketing Research position at Avon that I think I'd be perfect for, and I'm interested in making a contact there. I have eight years of Marketing Research background in the cosmetics industry and an MBA from Emory." Asking for help without any background is a big red flag, for list-serv folks. 9. If you see something posted on a list-serv that bothers you, send a message to the moderator rather than posting your complaint message to the entire list membership. Very often, the moderator will clarify the situation or even respond with "You're right, that message should never have been posted" and handle the situation with the errant poster directly. 10.If the list members help you out, say so! Send a quick thank-you to the helpful fellow member, and write to the entire list to say "Thanks for all the help on evaluating SFA systems. Overall, you seemed to favor Salesforce.com over the other applications." When you've posted a query and gotten lots of good responses, compile 'em in one message and post it back to the list creating a handy, printable or forwardable tip sheet for the other members.

How Not to Network We've shared a couple of online networking horror stories that happened to me, but there are hundreds more! Online networking is an arena where crazy things happen every day, and very often they fall into the category of “How Not to Network.” Some people view online networking as a vast arena into which to broadcast their business message. With no attempt to build relationships, add value to other people, or ever get past the "buy my

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stuff now" phase, they're oblivious to the real opportunities of online networking. They simply want to collect names for their database, and sometimes not even names — just E-mail addresses. If you begin to receive unwanted E-mail messages or LinkedIn requests from a person you don't want to know, say so. Ask to be taken off his or her mailing list, and if the connection was originally made via LinkedIn or an E-mail list-serv, report the spam to a person in the hosting organization where you first connected with the spammer. I'm talking here about "human spam," that is generated by a living person who has obtained your contact information through a site like LinkedIn or via an E-mail list-serv. For "machine spam," the messages that flood your inbox proposing that you buy Viagra, invest in a stock, or jump over to a pornography site — don't respond at all! If you reply to a spam message, you're only confirming that a live person exists at your E-mail address. Just delete the spam, and know that the spammer will spend an eternity in a flaming pit. There are a few other obvious "Don'ts" in online networking, which we'll touch on now. 1. Don't turn a business networking overture into a social one — because a person responds favorably to your business self-introduction, it doesn't mean that he or she is open to social invitations. It is a terrible violation of trust to turn a conversation about business interests to "So, are you single?" 2. Don't give assignments to people who don't work for you. When you contact a person out of the blue, perhaps with a request for help with your job search, you must not be miffed if you receive no reply. If a person can't help you and also doesn't have time to explain why, that's not a personality fault. You can't expect a person who doesn't know you and is not connected to you to have time to explain to you why your contact is not going to be accepted. 3. Don't be snippy or rude! It is easy to read too much into casual E-mails. Not everyone has perfect English skills, and some ideas are difficult to express in writing, for the best writers. Give people the benefit of the doubt, before you take offense at something that is written to you or about you.

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4. Don't forget to thank people for their help!

And here's a big one:

5. Do not ever appropriate a contact as your own. If a casual acquaintance says to you "I know John Smith, the ex-CEO of XYZ Corporation, whose son is in my son's class", that does NOT give you license to contact that person, using your acquaintance's name as an entry point. This is a terrible offense. If your acquaintance wants to make an introduction, he or she can do that. You cannot "leapfrog" over your friend to make your own overture, while using your friend's name for credibility purposes.

Let me repeat that one more time so that's it crystal clear. You may contact a person out of the blue without an introduction. You may ask a friend or acquaintance to make an introduction for you.

But if you do not ask for an introduction — or if your friend or acquaintance is not comfortable making an introduction, or forgets to do it, or for any reason doesn't make an introduction — you cannot usurp that duty. Your friend or acquaintance's name and "introduction rights" are not yours to borrow. Many people, me included, believe that (most) men and (most) women network somewhat differently. People who believe that men and women often network differently, may use different approaches when networking with men and women. I network the same way with everyone, but I do notice that often, men want to get right to business while women want to do more fact-checking with new contacts: where have you worked? What did you do before that? Who are your clients? Both approaches are fine with me, but you may find one style or another more to your taste.

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Of course, we could slice and dice the online-networking crowd along many dimensions apart from the obvious Men/Women divide. There are highly analytical networkers who seem to be looking for the magic algorithm that will turn their online contacts into dollars, euros or yen. There are highly empathetic networkers who seem mostly to want to know how each of their contacts is doing, and whether they've had a good week. All styles are welcome, online, or at least, there is a home for each of them.

Handling Sensitive Issues Online You may run into a sensitive or sticky issue in your online networking. I have seen online networkers ask other networkers for financial support. I have seen people make inappropriate suggestions online and I have witnessed ugly online flame wars. You could run into any of these situations. There is even a scenario in which a networker will not leave you alone — an online stalking situation. It is good to have some awareness of these problems before they arise. If you feel uncomfortable with correspondence that you are receiving from an online networking contact, do not ignore the problem. If you have already corresponded with the person, my suggestion is to write to him or her to say "I do not wish to correspond with you further. Do not contact me again." Also, contact the site or organization through which you and the annoying networker first made contact, to let them know about the problem. You may also be asked for help of a personal nature (like a therapy session) in your online networking. Each of us has his or her own comfort level with this kind of advice and support. It is perfectly fine to write "I am not an expert in this area; I wish I could help, but I'm afraid the issue is far outside my area of expertise." Of course, the Internet attracts all sorts of people, and in any community you may run across a person who is struggling with emotional issues or problems that would be better handled by a professional than by a

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remote networking associate. It's important to be sensitive, but to let a person you've met online know that you are not the best one to assist him or her.

Key Points Discussed Online networking etiquette is such a critical topic that we could have written several books on it. The most essential online networking etiquette rules are to put people and relationships ahead of business promotion and your own needs and to respect online networkers' privacy, their relationships (e.g. regarding introductions), and the line between business and personal matters.

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7

Online Networking for Problem-Solving

Online networking is a great way to cultivate contacts, gain advice, and broaden your perspective over the long term. But online networking is also a great day-to-day tool for addressing specific business needs, like getting a new job or securing a new client. This chapter focuses on online networking tips for job-hunters and people whose priority is securing new clients.

Online Networking for Job-hunters Here are two things you can do immediately to make your online networking a more effective part of your job-search strategy: First, update your LinkedIn profile in some way (to show that you've left your company, if you have left; or if you're job-hunting while still employed, update your profile in some other way) and blast out a Profile Update to let your contacts know that you're job-hunting. (Of course, remove your boss and any other LinkedIn contacts who should not be alerted to this bit of news from that distribution list.) Next, join at least one relevant E-mail list-serv and post a message to let your fellow members know that you're job-hunting. If you're posting to a list-serv where anonymous posts are allowed, you could post your message without contact information (just be sure to include an instruction to the Moderator in your message, to let him or her know that your post is meant to be anonymous). You could write:

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Dear fellow members, I have decided to change jobs, and would love to connect with search professionals, HR people or hiring managers who might be in need of someone with my skills. I have ten years of experience in technical writing and documentation, plus lots of technical content — production skills (Documentum, .html, online publishing, Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop) and a bit of graphic design experience. I'm versatile and love a fast pace and lots to do. To reach me, reply to the list, attention Jill. Thanks! Jill One of the benefits of online networking is that you can, perhaps, be more discreet while job-hunting than in the face-to-face networking realm. This is not to say you can abandon our online networking rules of propriety! Remember to thank and recompense those who assist in your employment search.

How to Find a Job Using LinkedIn A new grad sent an inquiry about using LinkedIn in her job search — here's the answer, in the form of a letter to my young friend. Take a look, and see how LinkedIn can help in your own job search!

Dear Emily, Congratulations on your new degree! Here are a few ideas on using LinkedIn in your job search. I don't think that an overt outreach campaign that reaches out to people (whether hiring managers, HR folks, or other influencers) at various companies and tells them about your job search, is going to be especially satisfying for you. For one thing, this is the sort of contact that people fear when they're trying to decide whether or not to join a network like LinkedIn. Unless there is some clear, compelling intersection between your background or talents and the company's specific need, I

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would view this as typically unwelcome contact. (I'm just one person. But I'm a ridiculously long-in-the-tooth HR person, with a focus on job hunting.)

Luckily, there are many better ways to use LinkedIn in your job search. Here are four of them, for starters: 1. Check out LinkedIn jobs, naturally. If you can see a job there, that means that you're connected to the job, which is very sweet for a new grad. If you do not have tons of connections, connect to your parents' friends, or anyone you know who's already in the business world. 2. Use LinkedIn for your job-search research project. You will focus on specific companies — you should do that, as it gives you a target for your job search and turns you into an active job researcher/seeker rather than just a person who trolls Monster.com all day long. As you identify these companies, you can learn a ton about them via LinkedIn. Search on the company name to find people who work there now or who used to work there — what sorts of backgrounds do they have? What sorts of education? Which of these target companies seem most suitable for you given your own experiences and interests? If you're looking to apply at a company and don't feel comfortable contacting someone who works there now, out of the blue (and who could blame you for that), contact someone who used to work there! Corporate alumni are under no pressure to recommend you for a job, and will most likely talk very freely about their former company. This is the indirect approach — LinkedIn is a terrific vehicle for that. (Do the person a favor, since he or she is helping you — create a logo for his or her teenage daughter's blog, for instance.) 3. Use LinkedIn to find relevant headhunters to talk to. Headhunters are well-connected and, like real estate agents, seldom shun a phone call that comes out of the blue (although it may take them

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awhile to call you back). They may not be able to help you find a job specifically — lots of search people don't work with new grads, because new grads are not the job-seekers that firms will typically pay search people to find for them — but they can advise you nonetheless. In ten minutes on the phone with a headhunter you can learn enough to target some companies, drop others from your list entirely, and save yourself hours or weeks of trouble. 4. Very important — use LinkedIn to expand the network of people you already know, who should be informed that you are out of school and job-hunting.

Where there isn't a compelling rationale for contact, it's awkward to reach out to strangers and say "Gee, want to hire me?" But you should absolutely use LinkedIn to get back in touch with people you already know — friends of your parents, your friends' parents and older siblings, the lady you babysat for in high school, anyone you interned for during college, the McKinsey VP who sang in choir at church all those years with your mom — get it? — and enroll them in supporting your job search. What you are doing with LinkedIn in this case is simply pulling together your existing network (the people you know, though you may not have thought of them as your network) and bringing them up to date on your professional status. Here's how to find them:

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Step 1.

Do a LinkedIn search on the city where you grew up and identify people you know. If you grew up in San Jose or New York or Chicago, scratch that and go right to Step 2.

Step 2.

Sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and list everyone in business that you know. A new grad should be able to list 100 such people — push yourself. Think about Girl Scout leaders, the volunteer who directed "Grease" in your senior year of high school, the track team parents, the librarian back in your high school who is a corporate Knowledge Manager now — you can do it! Once you have the list on paper (actually, do it in Word so you can cut and paste names into the LinkedIn search box) start looking for these folks on LinkedIn.

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Some of the people on your list won't be on LinkedIn yet, of course — if you really want to include them in the network you're constructing, you'll have to find their E-mail addresses so that you can invite them to join. The easiest way (short of phoning them) is to Google them — there's a decent chance you'll find an E-mail address that way. Out of your starter list of 100 friends-and-family advocates, it's likely you'll end up with a decent network of 65 LinkedIn contacts. Perhaps more! Good luck, Emily! Don't be timid when it comes time to negotiate the multiple job offers you are sure to be juggling before long.

Online Networking to Grow Your Business What about using LinkedIn for business development? That's a little different, because a job hunt only lasts as it takes to get a new job, while business development is forever. If anyone needs to learn the lesson that online networking is a long-term investment, it's a salesperson chomping at the bit to make a sale. Here is a set of tips for using LinkedIn to grow your business:

Using LinkedIn to Grow Your Business 1. When you have significant news in your business — for instance, a big product launch or a joint venture — use LinkedIn to notify your contacts by way of a profile update. And in your accompanying E-mail message to the network, say "I would love to catch up with you — want to make time for a phone call?" It's that keeping-up process that sparks conversations about opportunities both for you and your contacts. It's in these conversations (which could be done by E-mail, although probably not as well) that ideas will arise about prospective clients, partnerships, and other revenue-generating projects. 2. Use LinkedIn to understand the relationships between people you know and people you want to know. For me, this is the heart of LinkedIn's value — the ability to see at a glance how people you don't know, but would like to, are connected to people who are closer to you. So when you find Mr. Lofty Dude in the LinkedIn network and realize that he used to work with your former

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administrative assistant — a data point you almost certainly wouldn't have acquired on your own — you can reach out to the assistant and get, not only an introduction, but also some intelligence about Mr. Dude's current dealings, needs, and hot buttons. 3. Connect, by all means, with your former colleagues from every company that has ever employed you. There is something about old-workmate ties (unless you, er, aren't the sort that former teammates think of fondly) that can't be duplicated in most relationships of shorter duration. Seek out these old workmates, tell them what you're up to and who you're most interested in meeting, and offer to help them out as well. One good lead would be worth the price of LinkedIn membership — oh, wait, it's free — or worth the price of your time doing LinkedIn searching and connecting. 4. Let's say that you would dearly like to work with General Motors, but you can't find anyone at GM who seems especially suitable for contact as you search the LinkedIn database. No problem: Find a current GM vendor or customer in the functional area you're interested in, and reach out to him or her. Is there something of value that you could offer in exchange for the introduction you want? In an ideal world, your sterling qualities and dazzling personality should convince this new acquaintance that introducing her client to you is something of value all by itself. But don't bank on that. Offer to extend an invitation of your own, or design his or her new database, or something. 5. Use the LinkedIn database to understand more about your prospects. This is the beauty of LinkedIn — what other source will tell you where many or all of the senior execs of your prospect organizations used to work (given that only half a dozen of them have profiles on the company's Web site)? Let's say that you want to do some work for ABC Company. And lo and behold, half the ABC executives worked for PayPal back in the day and the other half worked for FedEx. Great intelligence! You see that they have a strong Notre Dame alumni thing going on, and some connection to Stanford as well. Now you can use your FedEx and PayPal

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alum contacts, your Notre Dame folks and your Stanford fellows to help you get 'over the wall.' 6. You wouldn't E-mail a complete stranger, even if you obtained his business card, (say, by stealing the win-a-free-lunch goldfish bowl of business cards at P.F. Chang's) to say "Hey, why not buy some stuff from me?" So please don't reach out to new LinkedIn contacts by saying "Maybe you could help me make a new-business contact." I wouldn't recommend that. Instead, read this intended contact's profile. Let's say you are reaching out to me, who runs an online community. Two seconds of reading my profile would give you some ideas of things that might interest me. I guarantee that a typical working person could offer me something I'd be interested in. So, when you make your LinkedIn outreach, mention that thing that you could offer! Write "I would love to connect by phone, both because I'm interested in your relationship with [my most-desirable prospect company] and because I have great friends in the social networking community whom you should know." Bingo. 7. Many people in the business community, especially avid networkers, have numerous connections that don't do any [short-term, revenue-generating] good for them personally, but that could be invaluable to their new networking contacts. Think about these valuable contacts as you reach out to people whom you hope might help you. For instance, I know lots of headhunters who have great media contacts — contacts I would drool over — journalists who regularly call them up for insights on the job market. Unfortunately, apart from occasionally mentioning in her stories that Joe Recruiter says that the job market is looking up, the journalist can't do much for Joe — she isn't going to write a profile on him any time soon, for instance. But she might write a profile on someone that Joe has just met through LinkedIn. Of course, Joe wouldn't throw around her name carelessly — but he might say, "You know, I can't guarantee anything, but for your kindness today I'd be happy to introduce you to my friend, an editor at the San Jose Mercury News (in Silicon Valley), who might be interested in talking with you." Rock on.

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8. When you spot a cluster of people on LinkedIn who all know one another and are all accomplished in the same arena, that's a really special thing. It means that a group of folks who perhaps worked together, or met online, or are part of a group together, represent a kind of mother lode of shared knowledge around a particular area — say, SEO, CRM, or German opera. That's huge, because these folks collectively may comprise the lion's share of the current thinking on the topic. You can reach out via LinkedIn to one of them, and say, "You know, I'm trying to get up to speed on the operas of Handel. May I send you an E-mail message with some of my key questions, and ask whether you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts with me and also forwarding my message to your friend Jack Sprat, who could undoubtedly add a valuable perspective?" With luck, in the case of an inquiry like this, you are able to repay these experts' valuable time with a gift of some kind (perhaps tickets to the opera). But many such people would refuse any compensation at all. It makes a huge difference how you present your situation and how graciously you pose your request. So much depends on good manners, doesn't it? 9. LinkedIn in combination with Google News Alerts makes a great business tool. Let's say you are looking to talk to folks at Fidelity who work in one product area. Use LinkedIn to find a name (or two or three names) of people at Fidelity who seem relevant to your situation, and whom you'd like to reach. Set up a Google News Alert on Fidelity, and set one up with the target person's name (or a few names) so that you can learn when he or she has been quoted, is speaking on a panel, etc. This kind of intelligence will tell you what's currently on the plate of this person, the issues he or she cares about, etc. What's more flattering than a LinkedIn outreach message that says "I was so sorry to miss your speech at the Financial Muckety-Mucks Summit, but I was fortunate enough to read your thoughts on petro-dollars on Money.com and to catch your NPR interview last week." Dang! Be diligent, but be careful that you don't sound like a business stalker. 10.Vendors like to reach out to former clients, and that's good, but it can be awkward when you haven't kept up and have no idea what the former client is now up to. But of course, if you've got the contact info, thanks (let's say) to Plaxo, you're going to use it!

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LinkedIn solves the problem. Presto, you can track what your former client has been doing since you last saw him — no awkwardness. On top of that, instead of an open-ended "let's catch up" message, you can say "Wow! You're at Fidelity! You know, I see that you've only been in the job a few months, so we should definitely talk. It so happens that I've become something of an expert on Fidelity lately…" Now, that's power networking!

Networking with Influencers vs. Networking with Clients People who begin a focused effort to network online in search of new clients often make the mistake of reaching out only to prospective clients to the exclusion of other people. This is not the best approach, because for most buyers, your product or service will only be of interest at a particular time — the time when the client has the need. For example: – If you're a technical recruiter, most IT and engineering managers won't have time to talk to you unless they have current openings they're having trouble filling. The rest of the time, there's a high probability that they'll ignore your overtures. – If you're a market research professional, the time to contact a prospective client is when he or she is just about to embark on a research project. But how can you possibly know when that time comes? – If you're residential real estate broker, you want to meet people who have plans to buy or sell a house. But people don't include in their online profiles, "I'm looking to buy or sell a house."

This is the problem for business-development-minded online networkers. When clients aren't in the market for your services, they don't feel like clients. They don't have time to talk to you. They have lots of other priorities than a casual chat with a service provider they don't know, who has reached out to them online, who may or may not be able to help them at some unspecified time in the future.

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Apart from the "point-in-time" problem, online networking business-developers have another problem: you are a stranger to these contacts! They don't know you. If you use LinkedIn to make contact with a new, prospective client, then the two of you have at least one networking associate in common. But that person may or may not have worked directly with you and may or may not be able to provide a service reference for you. Online networking is great because it provides you incredible reach. But what is doesn't provide you, much of the time, is credibility. People you meet in E-mail list-servs and on social networking sites don't necessarily know you, as they say, from Adam. For these two reasons — the point-in-time problem and the credibility problem — it's often better to network with Influencers than with prospective clients.

Who are Influencers?

Influencers are people who influence other people's decisions. They may be well-connected businesspeople, intellectual leaders in their fields, or just people who are good listeners and have a lot of friends. They are people who help other decision-makers decide on one course of action or another. If you see that a person you meet online (or any person) has written a number of published articles on a topic, speaks to audiences on the topic, is often interviewed by the media, or teaches college courses on a topic, you can assume that he or she is an influencer. If a person hosts a popular Web site on a topic that's close to your area of interest (for instance, Section 529 plans, risk management, or online networking), you can likewise assume that he or she is an influencer. Think about the people you know and work with. Some of them are influencers, to a small degree or to a massive degree. These are people you want to cultivate networking relationships with. You can meet them online even more easily than you can meet them in "real life."

How Do Influencers Help You?

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Influencers are critical in your online networking for business development (and important people for all online networkers to know). One influencer knows more people who can help you, than any ten of your non-influential friends. (That doesn't mean that your non-influencer

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friends are dog meat — of course we like and value all of our friendships, for different reasons. But we're talking about business development here. Influencers play a key role in that process!) Influencers will recommend you to prospective clients, people who often would not take your call or respond to your E-mail overture because they are too busy. They need the "sign of approval" from an Influencer contact of theirs that says "You should really talk to [your name]." That's what makes an Influencer so influential — people will take his or her call. Your time will typically be better spent networking online with Influencers than with the actual end users or prospective clients of your company. Prospects won't return your call unless they need your help right now; influencers, by contrast, will: 1. Typically be interested in talking to you, because they value their own knowledge of the business landscape, who's doing what, and who's got valuable offerings 2. Know which clients are in need of which services and when 3. Have the credibility to make a recommendation for your services that is trusted by their contacts

Influencers are sometimes called Power Networkers, but there is a difference between the two groups. Influencers are often Power Networkers. Power Networkers are often Influencers. But the two terms are not synonymous! Power Networkers are very active in networking, and often very visible in online networking circles. They may or may not be Influencers, too. Influencers may or may not be visible online. Sorry to say so, but some critical Influencers in any field haven't yet learned about, don't care about, or even shun online networking. The good news is that plenty of Influencers are already aware of the power of online networking, and are highly visible and reachable online. As you browse LinkedIn profiles, for instance, look at the industry associations that users have participated in. Look at the articles they've

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had published, the leadership roles they've held in industry and elsewhere, and look at their awards, speaking engagements, and other credentials. Access to Influencers is one of the greatest benefits of online networking. One strong Influencer relationship may be equal to or greater than twenty overtures to prospective clients. Even if you don't believe in the power of Influencers, include some of them in your online networking, in parallel to your direct client-contact efforts.

Key Points Discussed It's common for non-networkers to associate online networking almost exclusively with job-seekers and recruiters; with salespeople trolling for business; or with other businesspeople who need some, specific thing (like a job or a new client) right away. But online networking works best in the long term, and it's an amazing tool for all businesspeople, not just those in sales or those who are job-hunting. Successful online networkers understand the difference between cold-calling prospective clients and networking their way to those same prospects, and they understand the value of Influencers in general, in every aspect of online community.

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8

Creating an Online Networking Plan

At this point, you may be in information overload, but with luck, you should know more about online networking than you did when you picked up this book. You may feel overwhelmed, however. Why not cut through all the information and create an online networking action plan? Let's start by reviewing your online networking objectives. Are you after ten thousand new connections, one new client, or a very good pal in Singapore? Stop for a moment, and consider: what do I want from my online networking, right now? What do I expect to see in 30 days, 90 days and one year from now? Am I looking for: • • • •

A job? A new client? A speaking engagement? Something else?

It is easy to jump into the deep end of the online networking pool by signing up for every social networking site, joining every list-serv, and reaching out to every new person you spy. Here's the upshot of that: you'll make a lot of overtures that you won't have time to follow up on. It is embarrassing to launch an E-mail overture to someone, asking for a phone call, and having the person respond positively, at which point you realize "I have no time for this phone call!" This is a common problem for new online networkers. Launching that "Let's talk!" message is easy.

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Following up, taking the time to understand a new contact's business needs, and being ready to reciprocate (for every favor that you ask, offering a like service on your end) is the hard part. So, it pays to start slowly. Put a toe in the water by joining one social networking site and one E-mail list-serv. Try a few online forums, connect to a few people, and see what happens. As you become more familiar with the tools and with the online community protocols, you can get more ambitious. It won't take long for you to learn your way around the online networking ecosystem. Here is a good rule of thumb for launching and then expanding your online networking presence:

Don't Write Checks You Can't Cash. If you reach out to everyone, everyone will reach out to you. If you offer to help everyone with his or her issues, believe me, everyone will take you up on it. Your own work may suffer, not to mention your personal life!

Online networking, like life itself, is a journey rather than a destination.

Online Networking ***Horror Story*** #3 I joined an HR professionals' list-serv because I was a corporate HR person for twenty years and still consider myself an HR person at heart. Almost immediately, the moderator of the group asked me if I would consider becoming the regional Résumé Reviewer for the group. This group has a wonderful, free service for members, in which more experienced members volunteer to review résumés for job-seekers in the group. Why, sure! I said. I love to help job-seekers! Sure enough, resumes begin to arrive on my E-mail doorstep. I would read each one, make comments, and send 'them back to the job-seeker.

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One day, I received a résumé that gave me pause. It really needed work. The objective statement at the top of the résumé started with: In search of a challenging HR Director, HR Manager, HR Generalist or HR Coordinator role. Ouch — this résumé was not ready for prime time. So I dug in. I spent an hour and 45 minutes ripping this résumé apart and putting it back together again. I was happy with the result: a tighter, more readable, more credible résumé. I wrote back to the job-seeker who had sent me her resume. "I made a lot of comments," I said. "Please let me know if anything isn't clear." I got an E-mail message back right away. "Wow!" she wrote. "This is great! You gave me a whole new résumé! But, I am busy. I don't know when I'll have a chance to put your comments together and rewrite my résumé. Can you just distribute my old résumé to people you know, until then?" Online networking, like life itself, is a journey rather than a destination. I know one online networker who sets this goal for himself: to do something valuable for one online networking contact of his, every week. That's not a tall order — one favor, every week. That way, he knows that he is doing something worthwhile and planting seeds, Johnny-Appleseed style, to cultivate his network. He is not too worried about harvesting the apples right now, because he knows that the seeds he is planting will result in many tasty apple pies, crisps and strudels down the road. What does long-term, online networking success look like? Here are a few examples: 1. A person who wrote to me after reading an article I wrote for an online magazine, hired me to speak at her company, and afterwards made introductions to two other clients. 2. I hired a person I met on the RockyWIT E-mail discussion group (the Colorado branch of WorldWIT). 3. This book, Happy About Online Networking, came about because of a contact made online!

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One of the greatest joys of online networking for me is the link that online networking provides between strangers, assisted by technology. Fifteen years ago, it would have been difficult for a marketer in Norway to learn of my existence, much less to contact me directly. Online networking makes both projects easy. Later this year, I will travel to France with my teenage daughter, and on that trip I'll get to visit with people I met online but have never seen in person (yet). If I didn't have these wonderful contacts, I'd be a typical tourist, removed from the "real life" of French citizens, on the outside looking in. Online networking provides a tremendous tool to bridge geographic, age, industry, political, and other differences. Technology is the enabler, but human attributes (interest, attention, goodwill, kindness, trust) make the relationships go. And relationships, of course, are what make business go. So jump online, start your networking engines, and let's go!

Key Points Discussed Even as the potential for growing and developing your online network is nearly unlimited, it's important to remember that small steps toward building your network will be more manageable and give you more positive results than a full frontal attack on the online world. Make a plan, start slowly, and evaluate your progress at regular intervals. Online networking only begins on your keyboard. Where it goes over time — across continents, industries, cultures or career changes — is up to you.

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a p p e n d i x

A List of Major Social Networking Sites

Networking Resources

• • • •

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com WorldWIT: www.worldwit.org OpenBc (Open Business Club GMBH): www.openbc.com Ecademy: www.ecademy.com

Online NetworkingRelated Email Discussion Groups (list-servs)

• MyLinkedInPowerForum: www.yahoogroups.com/groups/mylinkedinpowerforum • LinkedInPowerWomen: www.yahoogroups.com/groups/linkedinpowerwomen • LinkedInBloggers: www.yahoogroups.com/groups/linkedinbloggers

List of Online Networking Informational Websites

• LinkedIntelligence: www.linkedintelligence.com • Some Assembly Required (networking and business development blog): http://thomsinger.blogspot.com • Intuitive Systems: www.intuitive.com

Recommended Networking Books

• “The Fine Art of Small Talk”, author Debra Fine • “The Virtual Handshake”, authors David Teten and Scott Allen • “Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting”, author Bill Vick with Des Walsh

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Appendix A: Networking Resources

a u t h o r

About the Author

Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 executive, serial entrepreneur, and expert on the new-millennium workplace. Liz was VP of HR for U.S. Robotics throughout its period of rapid growth in the 90's, and co-founded software startup Ucentric Systems in 1999 (now a division of Motorola). Liz founded Liz Ryan Consulting in 1997 to advise large employers and startups (DDB Needham, NBCi, Looksmart, et al) on their HR and organizational strategy needs; and in 1999 she founded WorldWIT, now the world's largest online network for professional women. Liz is the workplace columnist for Business Week online and a frequent CNN, CNBC and MSNBC columnist on the workplace, networking, and work/life topics. Liz writes on networking for the blog magazine New West (www.newwest.net) and on women and entrepreneurism for AllBusiness.com (www.allbusiness.com). She is a sought-after speaker and pundit, whom business guru Tom Peters called "a woman on a mission…..the right mission."

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author

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