"yahoo! kickstart: business networking with a social twist" by Muhammad Saleen

Filed under: social media — muhammad saleem @ 7:06 am

unlike other professional networking sites (like linkedin), yahoo has prepared a concept of a business networking site that will be truly social.

the business networking space has plenty of options for you to choose from but where yahoo’s network will be different is that it doesn’t necessarily help you directly get in touch with the upper management at potential employers or people in your industry that you would want to collaborate with. instead, yahoo! kickstart is focused towards a much younger market and helps connect college students with alumni at companies that interest them.

the concept already exists at many colleges and universities but is done manually, on paper and by phone, rather than through an online social network. for example, when i was going through recruiting and was thinking about applying to jp morgan, my career advising and planning services office flew in two recent graduates from our college who were working at the company, to come and talk to all potential applicants about the application and selection process, their work environment, how they manage their social lives with work, and lifestyle in the city. yahoo! kickstart takes this entire process online.

from what i’ve seen of the network so far, it seems that yahoo has created a great cross between linkedin and facebook. the site takes the individual and resume-based profiling feature from linkedin while looking more like facebook in terms of networking, group creation, company profiling and so on. just like facebook took the traditional paper-based college facebook online, yahoo! kickstart could be a stepping-stone from facebook to monster or career builder and finally linkedin.

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"yahoo! kickstart: business networking with a social twist" by Muhammad Saleen

Law and Letters: Facebook, Social Network Theory, and Playing Scrabble

from the Cyberian: This is just a brief part of a super posting by Belle Lettres (Over-Educated Epistolary Geek, J.D., LL.M., S.J.D. candidate, and Writer of billet-doux and long law review articles about federalism and employment discrimination law. Oh, and an Aspiring Law Professor.) Legal types, networkers and anyone just looking for a mix of charm, sophistication and some enlightenment should become site regulars...


Law and Letters: Facebook, Social Network Theory, and Playing Scrabble

Just yesterday, Just A Law Prof asked me:

1. What is the point of Facebook
2. Why would anyone want to broadcast his or her personal details and private information to strangers, and why would we care about someone else's business?
3. What are the rules of etiquette for Facebook? Must you "friend" (v., transitive) someone you've only met once? What about students?


My take:

As Rick Bales says, don't be so quick to knock thes social network power of Facebook. For more on this, read Danah Boyd's work on social networking sites. Danah Boyd is a PhD candidate at the School of Information at Berkeley and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Law & Technology center.

I really don't like certain aspects of exhibitionism on Facebook. But I understand its social network appeal. I've been learning a lot about organizational behavior and social network theory in the context of employment networks, and so to me this is just the division between the real world vs. the virtual world, rather than a generational gap (although that's articulated in other ways on Facebook).

The Milgram Small World Experiment set to demonstrate that we are no more than six degrees separated from anyone else in the world. If I had to get a package to another person in another state, and did not know that person, I would have to think of people I know who might know that person, or extend the chain to add a link. It's that "I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a girl who...." joke.
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Law and Letters: Facebook, Social Network Theory, and Playing Scrabble

More Google Alerts: Getting hard to keep up

DirectMatches.com Becomes Major Player in Business and Social ...
PR Web (press release) - Ferndale,WA,USA
The company is a waking giant in the buzzing online business and social networking space. The website is the fastest-growing, most popular business network, ...
See all stories on this topic

XING Powers Mobile Business Networking
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
Lars Hinrichs, Founder and CEO of XING AG, said of the new service "XING is the first business networking platform to recognize the importance of mobile and ...
See all stories on this topic
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More Google Alerts: Getting hard to keep up

online networking and the professions that use it

online networking and the professions that use it

Filed under: social media — muhammad saleem @ 5:41 am

online networking is moving beyond just socializing and into the professional arena. from doctors to educators, here’s a look at some of the best professional networking sites and the professions that are utilizing them.

networks for the medical profession

though there are countless networking sites for physicians, doctors, and medical students, sermo is by far the most popular. sermo let’s physicians connect and share observations from their daily practices and ‘challenge or corroborate each others opinions’. this helps people in the medical profession apply the idea of collective intelligence towards better patient care.

related networks: doctors’ hangout, student doctor, doctor networking, social md, clinical village

music-based networks

of all the music-based social networking sites i’ve used, last.fm provides the cleanest, least intrusive and easy-to-use experience. the site tracks your music and based on what you listen to most – locates other artists, albums, and songs according to your preferences. The service let’s you connect with people who share your musical tastes and allows artists and lables to upload their own music to the site and share it with other users.

related networks: ilike, jam now, sell a band, buzz net, sound pedia

networks for educators

there are some older and more established networks for teachers, but yahoo is about to take teacher-focused social networks by storm. yahoo! teachers is ‘designed by teachers for teachers’ to help them connect, create, share, and modify lesson plans for their students. the site is currently not open to public but the private beta preview looks very promising.

related networks: yacapaca, nextgen teachers

photography-based networks

with photobucket, smugmug, zooomr, and many more, the photography-hosting/sharing/networking space is far from under-served. that said, flickr stands out from the crowd and continues to grow faster than the other top 4 combined.

related networks: fotki, fotolog, photobucket, smugmug, zooomr

networks for business verticals

linkedin is the most popular professional networking site and it is also the number one business networking site ( excluding employment search sites like monster, careerbuilder, etc.). the site is maintained in a minimalist yet comprehensive - functional fashion and offers countless opportunities for networking with contemporaries or working in ancillary fields, without compromising your privacy.

related networks: ryze, doostang

this is by no means a comprehensive list of professional networking sites or the professions that have made the leap to online networking. in fact, many professionals continue to use all-purpose networks such as facebook, myspace, and linkedin, rather than focusing on their niche.

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online networking and the professions that use it

The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital (by Joe Lamantia)

August 30, 2007 03:17 PM | Posted in: Networks and Systems

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins - search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. - to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web's ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations - albeit of unknown lifespan - and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields - another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was - like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system - not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

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The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital (by Joe Lamantia)

Italians Top Mobile Social Network Access In Europe

By Amanda Lorenzani

More Italians access social networking sites on their mobiles than any other EU country. According to a recent M:Metrics report, 1.3 million Italians accessed a social network on their mobile phone in June 2007 putting Italy at the top ...
blognation italy technology -
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Italians Top Mobile Social Network Access In Europe

Nokia: Oy Vey!, from A Media Circus

As Apple continues to conquer the digital download market, the threat of Apple achieving the same status in the mobile arena is weighing heavily upon the mobile industry. Apple’s potential stronghold in the mobile industry is subsequently posing a threat to various related industries. Entertainment and gaming are two industries becoming more inextricably linked to the mobile devices than ever before, and if Apple gains enough control over the handset, they will inevitably gain control over the things that run on the handset.

In response to Apple’s mobile play, Nokia issued a series of press releases announcing various devices and services for the mobile consumer.

Ovi and Content Convergence

The idea of content convergence is often mistaken. I often make reference to Henry Jenkins’ notion of The Black Box Fallacy which refers to how people tend to think, one day all of our media will be contained in one unit. This will most likely not be the case (can you imagine carrying around a cable box all day ).

The reality is that we will have many devices for different purposes (the bedroom, the car, personal devices) but the content will be interoperable across a variety of devices. (For example, Facebook online will contain the same information as the Facebook that is accessed via a mobile phone, however the interface will be appropriated for your phone, taking into account the time and place that one uses their phone).

The diagram above is a model of how content convergence/hardware divergence works.

As usual I digress, back to Ovi

Ovi is the name of Nokia’s new internet services brand. Ovi is Finnish for “door”. The metaphor here is apparent; Ovi is the door to your all of your digital content and your social network. Ovi will also act as a door to two of their other new services, The Nokia Music Store (a platform that rivals iTunes) and N-Gage, Nokia’s mobile gaming service.

Incidentally, I love the copy on the site that refers to N-Gage:

“Keep the action going while you’re on the go with the power of N-Gage”

This line furthers the notion that the gaming does not stop when you turn the console off. The convergent nature of emerging platforms is made for gamers on the go.

The Nokia Music Store

I got an iPhone about a month ago and the one thing I cannot do with it that I want to do (besides cut and paste) is download music on the spot. It seems like a no-brainer, right?

"The Nokia Music Store brings together a powerful combination of great music and great devices in an easy to use way. You can select from a huge range of music, including local music from your country, and download it directly to your Nokia device," say’s Tommi Mustonen, the head of Nokia’s music activities.

This is a big step.

Payment can be made by a variety of methods including paypal. This is certainly a big step as mobile commerce becomes more of a reality. There is another point in the release that I thought was very compelling,

…the Nokia Music Store aims to provide more locally relevant music than any other digital music store. If you want to see what others are enjoying, the Nokia Music Store provides a dynamic recommendations engine as well as genre-based instant playlists.

The one drawback to all this (for me) is that there was no mention of a US release date, however the music store will be opening across key European markets this fall with additional stores in Europe and Asia opening over the coming months.

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Nokia: Oy Vey!, from A Media Circus

Tough time ahead for Indian networking sites

Priyanka Joshi And Sapna Agarwal / Mumbai/New Delhi August 28, 2007

Competition with online international networks hots up in cyberspace .

The online social networking market is getting crowded. With international social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace becoming a part of the daily routine for the 38.5 million Internet users in India, the Indian social networking wannabes will have a tough time ahead.

To name a few, Reliance ADA group’s Bigadda.com, Yaari.com founded by Stanford University graduates Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia, MIH India’s portal Ibobo.com, People Group’s Fropper.com and many others are here for a “friendly” tussle.

The Internet user base is estimated to grow to 100 million by 2007-08, according to Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). It is estimated that 10 per cent of the present Internet audience is active on social networking portals, which is close to 4 million users today.

By all measures, online networking in India has moved beyond scrapping, a term used for posting messages on the social networks, to become a more interactive medium. The users now experiment with over a dozen-odd sites present in the cyberspace before narrowing down to a couple of favourites.

The question that still remains, however, is how many social networks any single user is likely to join and remain active in? Siddhartha Roy, chief operating officer, BigAdda, comments: “The aim of our site is to increase the user stickiness, and hence our obsessive dedication towards user generated content like blogs, music and video.” The portal is eyeing 10 million users by 2010.

Roy says BigAdda would soon make a debut in mobile phones and regional languages. “Games and content sharing tie-ups with Zapak.com will materialise in the next few weeks. We are also looking for third party content providers,” he adds.

Orkut, a social networking portal bought over by Google, is hugely popular in India. For Orkut, moving to a mobile version and integrating Google applications on its social networking portal seems to be the next logical step.

Vinay Goel, products head, Google India, concurs that Google’s ownership of videos through YouTube and its services like Gmail and instant messenger should see an integration with Orkut. He also indicated that a “single sign in” platform, wherein the user could log in with a single user name, can be expected.

Although Goel does not discount the competition from Indian networking sites, he says, “It would be difficult for any single site to gain the user volume that Orkut has.”

There are financial reasons fueling the competition too. Globally, advertisers are expected to spend $1.9 billion on online social networks by 2010, up from $280 million in 2006.

Quite expectedly, Sequoia Capital has already invested $2 million in the Indian start-up minglebox.com, a site focusing on the college and student alumni networks.

For smaller players like Yaari.com, gathering a sizeable user base seems to be the immediate priority. The site is gifting iPods to its most popular users in an attempt to grow its network.

Having created a successful online matrimonial portal like Shaadi.com, People Group seems to have immense faith in its online dating and networking site, Fropper.com, that garners 70,000-1,00,000 registrations a month, or so claims the company.

“With a registered user base of 2.5 million people, our site has managed to increase the average time per user on the site from 8-10 minutes per visit to 15-30 minutes per visit,” says Navin Mittal, business head, Fropper.com.

Meanwhile, others like the South African media conglomerate Naspers’ Indian subsidiary, MIH India, is popularising contextual networking, blogging and photo sharing services on its networking portal, ibibo.com.

Ashish Kashyap, chief executive officer, MIH India, is hopeful that the trend of users migrating from Orkut to other social media sites would accelerate in future.

“The reasons for migration range from privacy concerns, finding like-minded people and friends on other sites to features like blogging, photo sharing, polling and others,” he adds.

However, the irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the Internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness could stifle their potential.

How about considering an interoperable social networking platform? Many of the fun-seeking Facebookers may actually be the very same respectful professionals at LinkedIn or techTribe. So, we need a system that connects all social networks — that a user is a member of — and shares basic functionalities.

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Tough time ahead for Indian networking sites

New Social Networking Site Kicks Off with Contest for Nonprofits

Submitted by Annaliese on Tue, 08/28/2007 - 9:31am.

Everyone's debating the effectiveness of social networking tools for fundraising campaigns. A new social networking site, Razoo, seems to want to cut to chase: they're going to give $10,000 to a nonprofit organization that signs up at least 100 new members by September 15th. And it's not just a numbers game, as the winning nonprofit organization will actually be selected from the community based on their social change projects. Here's more from their site:

"Any social change organization that creates a Razoo Group and recruits at least 100 members to join by September 15th will be entered into the Change Your World Contest. The Razoo community will then vote for its favorite organization to select the winner of the contest. The prize is a $10,000 donation to your organization, and a high-profile online campaign built around your issues and work."

You can find out more about the contest here.

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New Social Networking Site Kicks Off with Contest for Nonprofits

Where slackers meet schmoozers, by Jonathan Guthrie

<<<>>>

Procrastination used to be the thief of time. These days it is Facebook. Bosses grumble that staff waste hours fiddling around on networking websites. The inboxes of users are clogged with spam recording the latest non-event in their cyber social lives (“Dear member, a bored stranger just looked at your profile!”). Online communities include Skiving on Facebook, whose 115 members evidently believe employers are too stupid to rumble them.

The use of networking websites has spread contagiously among the computerised classes. If the cost in time wasted exceeds the value added, the relationship will resemble that of a parasite to its host organism. The main function of the technology will then be to divert resources towards its survival and growth.

Some big organisations, including the US Army and Transport for London, have blocked access to social networking websites. Good for them. Dresdner Kleinwort says of its own Facebook ban: “We only provide access to the internet for the purpose of conducting company business.”

Other employers are nervous of admitting they have imposed the same reasonable restriction. British Gas says while staff cannot network online at their workstations, they can do so on personal computers in break-out areas. This exposes leisure internet use to the scrutiny of managers. Lloyds TSB claims networking websites lie outside its firewall solely to protect its IT systems from viruses. Facebook itself declines to comment.

Employers would object robustly if staff threw private parties at work, photocopying their bottoms and grinding Cheesy Wotsits into the carpet squares. But organisations are afraid blocking access to the online equivalent will make them look like Luddite control freaks. Anthony Bradley of IT consultant Gartner expresses the accepted wisdom that “mainstream organisations should embrace technology and not stifle innovation”. He argues that bosses should dictate targets not behaviour, saying: “If you have to know what employees are doing every hour of the day, you are a bad manager.”

This may hold good for polite, white-collar businesses. But in some companies, trust is never debated because certain staff members can be relied on to steal any item that is not bolted down. That aside, one has to question the business utility of online networking by employees who have no external role.

In contrast, sales people and other deal-doers charged with building outside relationships have legitimate reasons for networking online. The websites are also markets and meeting places for the ever-expanding legions of service sector self-employed, who need to clump into teams to tackle big projects. The internet is a good place to find collaborators. Penny Power, co-founder of Ecademy, an online business network that started in the UK, estimates that more than half its 200,000 members are self-employed professionals. For many, the network is a substitute for the camaraderie of office life. She says: “It can be very lonely if you have left a big corporate and are sitting at home wondering where the next pay cheque will come from.”

Others in business struggle to understand both the potential and the practice of online networking. Sarah Green, head of social anthropology at Manchester University, says the advent of the telephone caused similar bewilderment. “Distance technology”, as she calls it, reduces context. This is a problem, given that “an awful lot of what goes on in business conversations is not openly stated”. Subtexts are less of an issue in such typical MySpace pleasantries as: “Big up gurl, you is reelly hot, innit!!!”

The unwillingness of many business people to network online partly reflects the lack of a commonly agreed etiquette. One knows the code that governs networking at work-related events. Do not buttonhole a bigwig who is deep in conversation with two other bigwigs. After chatting to a new acquaintance for a few minutes, disengage politely. And do not regale a man in episcopal purple with a tipsy impersonation of the comedian, Roy “Chubby” Brown.

Web networking is harder to fathom. If you post a picture of yourself in a tie, will you look like a square? If you are wearing an open-necked shirt, will you look like a hippy? If you message Philip Green asking for business tips, will he reply? And what is it about your profile (single male pensions actuary interested in steam locomotives) that has inspired an offer of friendship from a 21-year-old Thai woman?

The risk is that building a personal brand online will displace tasks with greater scope for advancement. It is easier to waste an hour updating your profiles than to spend five minutes on the phone pitching to a powerful client. Liz O’Donnell of LinkedIn, the US-based online business network, says: “The more channels of communication there are, the more disciplined you need to be in using them. Online networking is simply a tool whose effectiveness depends on how you use it.”

Alternatively, you may not bother at all, believing online networking, like lunch, is for wimps. I recently met a senior business figure who gazes down on those toiling in the vineyards of capitalism as from a lofty mountain top. Does this titan ever dabble on Facebook, I asked. “No,” he said, “but I think my secretary does.”

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Where slackers meet schmoozers, by Jonathan Guthrie

Defining Social Network Engagement Metrics, by Marshall Sponder

Engagement - how do we measure Social Network Engagement (Social Networking by the Numbers - but the problem is that Social Networks were measured by numbers of members not by engagement, even though Engagement - Social Network Engagement is what Liz Gannes was talking about)?

In New Rules of Engagement, the New York Times put the measure of "engagement" inside of us:

"...engagement "happens inside the consumer, not inside the medium," Mr. Plummer said. "All the measurements we have now are media metrics: ratings, readership, listenership, click-through rates.""

But you know what, Facebook is getting into the act (getting in "your face" so to speak) and defining what Facebook thinks Engagement for Social Network is and how it ought to be measured. Now, if I could only get someone, high up, on Facebook to join our Social Network Committee....that would very interesting.

Now, what Facebook is doing might be the beginning of some kind of standards for Social Network Engagement:

"...we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of "Daily Active Users." Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application's total number of users.

This change is part of our commitment to making Facebook Platform better for both developers and users. And, we hope that through this change, you continue to focus on creating engaging applications which add maximum utility to a Facebook user's everyday life."

If I'm reading this correctly, what Facebook is going to measure is not so much engagement of a user, but the engagement of an application running on Facebook.

So we might end up with a list of the most engaging applications of Facebook for the week, or the most engaging for the month, or for all time.

I'd also like to get some definitions on Canvas Page views and Mock-Ajax Form Submission events.

Engagement (defining Social Network Engagement and how it should be measured) is one of the main focuses of the new Social Media Committee of the Web Analytics Association that I'm the Director.

They're getting there - at least they are supporting the importance of "how long ago" as a primary driver when defining engagement.

Now if they would only supply this same info at the user level, they'd be getting somewhere. I'd be willing to bet most of this "widget engagement" is spread across a small base of users in any one period.

Real question is this: what percent of heavy widget users have not used a widget in the past 90 days? In other words, what percent of the user base is now dis-engaged?

That's a useful measure of engagement.

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Defining Social Network Engagement Metrics, by Marshall Sponder

Google's Secret Society, by Andy Greenberg for Forbes.com

Who's the Google of social networking sites? The obvious answer may seem to be Facebook, given its rapid growth, successful cooperation with application developers, and ever-smarter ad targeting. But by some measures, the real answer is even more obvious: Google itself.

This week, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) is drawing attention to its often-ignored social networking site, Orkut.com, with a redesign intended to prettify the site's Spartan look. And attention is deserved: Despite its low profile in the U.S., Orkut now draws 38.2 billion page views a month worldwide, 7.8 billion more than Facebook, according to comScore Media Metrix.

In Brazil, where Facebook and MySpace are virtually unknown, Orkut has become a smash hit, with 15.6 billion page views monthly, by the count of Nielsen/Net Ratings. That kind of popularity doesn't just dwarf Facebook's Brazilian traffic, which is practically nil; it's also nearly 10 billion more monthly page views than Facebook draws from Americans.

Orkut's success in Brazil seems largely to be a fluke. The site hasn't made any special appeal to Brazilians, and only began to offer a Portuguese-language option in April of 2005, long after it had become the social network of choice in Brazil. One blogger argues that its name, which was taken from Turkish-born Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, is catchy in Portuguese and reminds Brazilians of a popular yogurt drink for kids.

But a bigger question than the cause of Orkut's popularity is the site's potential for profit. Facebook will earn more than $100 million this year, according to one of the site's investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. And with the right advertisers, Orkut's Brazilians and other foreign users could also be a significant source of revenue, argues Greg Sterling, a consultant with Sterling Market Research. "If you've got the ad coverage, an international user is as valuable as anyone," he says.

In fact, Google's foreign advertising coverage has been spreading. The company's revenues from sources outside the U.S. and Britain, earned almost entirely from selling targeted ads, amounted to $1.24 billion last quarter, nearly twice the number from just a year ago. That brings the percentage of Google's foreign revenue to 60.8%, up from 46.7% last year.

While that spending might make Orkut an unlikely "heavy-weight" of social networking, as blogger Michael Arrington recently wrote, the site will need to gain a much larger U.S. audience to compete long-term with networks like MySpace and Facebook. MySpace still leads the social networking market by a large margin, and Facebook tripled its audience in the last year, according to comScore, while Orkut grew only 64%.

But Google, which won't disclose Orkut's revenue numbers, has recently been putting more of its massive resources behind the site. On top of this week's redesign, the company last year sponsored a social networking project at Carnegie Mellon to develop a tool meant to improve Orkut's domestic popularity. The result was Socialstream, a prototype for a site that allows users to post text and multimedia content to a single page, then syndicate that content to any social network where they have a profile.

Combined with Orkut, Socialstream might be just the sort of Googlish innovation that breaks down the "walled-garden" approach to social networking favored by Facebook and MySpace and brings American eyeballs to Orkut. If Google could provide Orkut with a competitive advantage, it could easily build a community from the audience that uses its services like Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Maps, Google Calendar and its photo-sharing site, Picasa, says Sterling.

"Until now, Orkut has been an also-ran in the U.S. because it's been neglected by Google," Sterling says. "But with just a few tweaks and redesigns, and in combination with all of Google's services, it has the potential to really differentiate itself from MySpace and Facebook."

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Google's Secret Society, by Andy Greenberg for Forbes.com

This Week in TNNW...

One Business Woman’s Experience in the World of Networking
By *RUTH GATLING, Mid-Atlantic Bureau Chief

Those of us who are lucky enough to live in the most densely populated and diverse state in the country also have a plethora of networking opportunities at our fingertips. In the three short years since I started my business I have become an avid networker. I spent my first year in business checking out different organizations in the area including Chambers of Commerce, industry specific organizations, social organizations and referral based networks. I learned that on most business days during most of the year it was possible to find at least one if not more networking events taking place somewhere in the state. Since that continues to be the case, it translates into a lot of networking! That first year was fun, stressful, educational and an overall great experience. But I went to so many events I suffered from networking overload. These days you won’t see me at a lot of functions. As a single mom and small business owner I have limited time and resources. I’ve honed my networking skills and pick and choose where, when and how I want to network.

From the Lips of a Las Vegas Networker
By BETTE DAOUST, Ph.D., Southwest Bureau Chief

Las Vegas is booming and so are the number of networking events. Networking in Las Vegas goes beyond Chambers, BNI and LeTip. It is booming in the fact that there are numerous groups and people that are forming their own networking groups with their own potential customers. Let me explain (from the lips of a Las Vegas networker)...

How to Make One Hell of a Profit and Still Get to Heaven
By MEIRA FINDEL, Financial Editor

Through my fabulous email list a few months ago I was contacted to host Dr. John Demartini for an evening in New Jersey where 50 people join us for dinner and a 2-hour seminar. After meeting John I attended his life changing Breakthrough seminar in NYC. His teachings are liberating and enlightening. John travels all over the world around 40 weeks a year changing people’s lives.He is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author and consultant who breathes life and enthusiasm into his audiences with his enlightening perspectives, humorous observations of human nature and practical action steps. When he speaks, hearts open, minds become inspired and people are motivated into action.

Getting Along
By MARIA ELENA DURON, Multicultural Networking Editor

Potter mania still burn strong and even in the wizarding world we see discrimination – from muggles to purebloods and goblins to house elfs. Of course, I’m referring to the literary phenomenon written by J.K. Rowling known as "Harry Potter".

When we think of discrimination, what first comes to mind? To most people, the word bring up the idea of a group of Caucasians attacking a certain race – may be African Americans, Hispanics, Chinese, or Filipino. Although this may be the truth in some instances, discrimination is actually closer to home for us all.

Tips and tricks for Webinars - The Webinar Experience
By MIKE O'NEIL, Technical Editor

In Part 1 of this series we got ready to put on and attend a Webinar.

In Part 2 we discussed the components of the Webinar itself.

In Part 3 here we discuss the Webinar "Experience" itself and how to make the most of it. What makes a Webinar an especially good Webinar or a bad one? It can be the tiniest details that make the Webinar go one way or another.

Most Webinars involve attendees who go to a web site and follow along with the presentation. A conference call provides the audio. As you can expect, there are plenty of bells and whistles but we will keep it to the basics here.

Creativity in Networking
By HARVEY MATHASON, Contributing Writer

Have the burdens of work ever built up inside you so much that you reached a tipping point and said, "I need a vacation?" In fact, you acted on your desire, planned and took a vacation. Welcome to the world of self-renewal. A vacation is simply one form of self-renewal. There are many other forms. Self-renewal is a way of getting your mind away from work, a way of letting go and having fun. It could be taking a walk, going for a swim in the ocean, getting together with friends, going to a play, or taking a nap. The ways of achieving self renewal are as great as your imagination will allow. In fact you can achieve it simply by alternating a different type of work with the work you do. Self- renewal will make you more productive and give you more energy. You will become "alive" with people you are networking with.

Jetnetting
By HESHIE SEGAL, Contributing Writer

What takes so little effort and yet has so much power? A compliment! You can begin or enhance a relationship simply by giving a compliment. A good compliment reaches the heart and opens it up. All you need is to look, and find a genuine reason for giving it. Be sincere and you establish a credible foundation upon which you can build. Give an insincere compliment, or one just for the sake of being give, and integrity is lost. The potential result of the latter is alienation and even mistrust.

Power Thought of the Week
By PATRICIA PARHAM, Ph.D., Contributing Writer

Strategic Alliances: Build in Milestones

Set targets and timetables for review and assessment into your agreements. These checkpoints define expectations and ensure that the lines of communication are open. Early on, make them more frequent. Be honest and diplomatic about what’s been achieved. Strengthening your relationship empowers both partners. Share your successes with your networks. Everybody loves a celebration!

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