Business Networking

Business networking boils down to creating meaningful relationships with other humans.

It's not about how many business cards you collect or how many friends you have on Facebook.

Here's a link to a good article by Liz Lynch the helps to illustrate this idea.

Assuming you've got that principle absorbed, let's look at some web sites that can help you accelerate the process of meeting quality people to work with.

MeetUp and CraigsList are good ones for finding local, live interest groups.

Some Social Networking sites designed for Business include:

LinkedIn - The most popular Business Networking site on the web.

Xing - Europe's most popular

Facebook - Primarily a social site but still 1 of the top 5 most important business networking platforms.

Plaxo - Another social site with a business tilt. Very clean and open structure

YouTube - Don't forget the Video!! If you have any creativity or desire to be in front of the camera, the YouTube community could easily be the most effective vehicle to getting your message out.

Flickr - A vibrant social community built around photo sharing.

Twitter - A free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time. More of a communications tool than a business network but because of it's amazing growth it's not to be overlooked. Tweeternet gives a pretty good review.

Delicious - Possibly the most helpful concept on the web yet!! Delicious is social bookmarking site. Online bookmarks so can use your bookmarks from anywhere. The real value though is that you write a little blurb about all your bookmarks and you can tag them and rate them in order to share them with the rest of the community. Try it out!! Bookmark this on Delicious

Digg - Digg is a web site made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying.

Ning - Create your own community for free on ning. Here's ours www.openmarketforum.ning.com

Those are our favorites, Here's link to Wikipedia's list of social networking sites and InsideCRM.com's top 50 sites for business networking..

Remember, marketing your business to these networks requires a whole different approach than traditional marketing mediums.

You can pay to have your ad pushed around the network which is similar to traditional avenues however in most cases to really tap into the pulse of social networking you've got to be active in the community. The more valuable you are as a resource in discussion groups and helpful you are in general the better things are going to go for you.

The key principle to grasp in marketing on the social networks is the viral effect.

Viral marketing is defined as "any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence."

So those are main 2 concepts to remember:

-Be Helpful
-Use Viral Techniques like widgets and wikis