Anonymous or "blind" meetings may be a common occurrence for a single adult who frequents dating websites, but it is an experience I had yet to embrace - especially in the business sector. For those who haven't joined one of the ever-growing list of online business networking sites, these services are specifically tailored to facilitate communication and referrals for professional purposes. You submit your contacts, invite friends and colleagues to be part of an "inner circle" of business or personal associates, then use the system to seek "friends of friends" or business contacts of your associates. Soon, this inner circle of contacts expands as individuals are contacted directly or as introductions are made by mutual friends and associates.
Where services such as Friendster, MySpace and Connexion have been successful bringing singles and groups together based on affinity and mutual interests, business-networking services are now offering a parallel experience in the professional world. Along with LinkedIn are such offerings as Ryze and Tribe.net. My take? This use of online, friend/associate-based networking will prove to be one of the most valuable business tools the Internet has yet provided.
Although the number of these services available to entrepreneurs and businesspeople is growing, LinkedIn strikes me as the easiest to embrace, and the most effective. Typically, each service has formal sign-up steps that assist you in creating your online identity. This may include information relating to your current job, previous positions, and general interests. Some business networking sites enable you to publish you own "blog," or join specific community discussion groups.
Often, the key to using a business network successfully involves the creation of your personal friends — or business connections — group. The registration process is similar across the various social networking websites but LinkedIn boasts one of the simplest methods of inviting and maintaining your social network. By simply uploading an exported file from your contact manager, LinkedIn can immediately tell which friends of yours are members of the service. This method of contact maintenance and connection group development makes LinkedIn a breeze to start with, immediately enabling you to gain access to your contacts, without having to laboriously enter emails to discover if associates are already there.
With your account set up and contacts entered, a small but growing network of individuals can now easily search your personal network for relevant business contacts. This may be as simple as entering a name of an individual you're seeking, or specifying a broad search for contacts within a specific industry. This ease of creating personal contacts and developing online business events makes the service much more efficient than the traditional (and often stilted) network mixer.
Although most online business networks are currently free, the model will soon change to a subscription basis, and just as many IM users have AOL and MSN accounts, those in the business world will need to join and maintain accounts on multiple services, until bridges are built to connect them all. The pay-for-network service model is familiar to most businesses. Offline business networking events are rarely free, and even high-priced events rarely allow people to find who they need. By contrast, online business networks enable members to seek a confident introduction through a friend, to a much-needed business contact - clearly, a valuable capability. Although my "blind" meeting went well, and my new business contact is now part of my personal business network, it's not much of a stretch to imagine a time when the in-person meeting itself will be all but obsolete. With the growing array of Web-based live communication tools, an online business networking site can offer a meeting environment where professionals can converse, face to face, through the site's own technologies.
The natural next step beyond assisting with the network meeting process is to provide an online application facilitating rich, real-time communication. Just as in the online dating world competition for members depends on expanding feature sets, leaders in the emerging online business networking space will separate themselves by implementing new applications that support better methods of business collaboration online. Forward-thinking entrepreneurs will do well to begin getting comfortable with online audio and video technology, so that they can be among the early adopters as these services become available.
Author : Michael Jones, President of Userplane
Source : about.com
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