JOBMATCHBOX

I’m a big fan of the beach and go every chance that I get, but the first time I hit a beach on the East coast I remember that the water was really cold.  I stuck one toe in and stopped.  I had expected to just jump right in and that the water would be warmer.  Networking is a little like this too.  For most people who haven’t done it before it is a really tough to get into.  You walk into a crowded room of people and there are so many strangers in the room.  The most natural thing to do is walk up and start talking to someone who you know, but in networking your goal is to meet new people and extend your conversation range.  Notice that I didn’t say rolodex (these days you can do that on Linkedin or elsewhere), but “conversation range”.

Yesterday I was talking to two different people who convinced me that I needed to take the plunge, into the networking Ocean that is out there.  In talking to them I realized that I have had one toe in.  Now don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I’m not networking.  I go to all kinds of different events and meet and have conversations with new and interesting people all the time.  The problem is that to be a really good networker requires that you constantly identify and explore uncharted territory.  In my case this means figuring out new groups of people to interact with from time to time.

The lesson here is that we all stand to benefit from expanding our social context so consider this a dare to go out and jump in - it will be a bit uncomfortable at first, but you’ll be comfortable before you know it.  Don’t just stockpile online contacts.

A few months ago my biggest concern was over whether or not it was a good idea for someone to create a social network aggregator.  I spent some time looking at social network aggregators and even more time considering the implications for user privacy involved with them.  I also considered the subject of OpenID, a possible alternative.  But since then it seems like the need for a social network aggregator has been resolved by efforts of competing companies to replicate each other’s services and also each other’s hubs.  In other words, if you have a list of contacts in one place you can a) interact with them elsewhere without re-creating the wheel or b) import them wherever you go or c) interact with them up to a certain point without re-creating the wheel. 

The problem with all of these is generally the same - if one company allows you to pack up your contacts and all of the data associated with them and all of the data involved with your activity inside of their universe then you can leave them behind and not look back.  Companies have a vested interest in preventing this.  In a company’s early stages it may be advantageous to allow data to play well elsewhere, but over time this becomes a problem.  And with this problem social networks become much more like traditional service providers - think big telco’s that have learned to make it extremely difficult for you to leave them for another carrier.  

In the mean time, we all have to deal with the service and feed pluralism while the major players battle it out for our already short attention span.  Take Plaxo - they have re-introduced the “USERNAME is …” status indicator to us.  I guess they didn’t get the memo about the “is”.  Plaxo is suggesting people who I might know just like Facebook now too.  And then there are Linkedin and MySpace - both of them are working hard to replicate features and the UI of Facebook.

We all have to make personal choices about how we interact with the social graph, but with all of these different companies offering similar services it is getting increasingly difficult to do so.  In this increasingly competitive market the winners will be the established players, not the newcomers.  Google and Facebook will continue to dominate, but Yahoo might be in a position to re-gain some ground if they can work on improving their ui and product/content integration. 

I’ve been using LinkedIn since the early days and would pitt the effectiveness and value of my online social network there against anyone.  I’ve been a big fan for a very long time, but I am starting to question whether or not it has any value.  I say this for two really important reasons:

1. It takes about as long to load a page as Windows Vista takes to boot up.  Seriously!  LinkedIn needs to get their system’s performance up to modern standards.  Don’t even get me started about how long it takes to reach through and connect with someone….more on this in my next point

2. The other reason is that the social networking has been neglected in the name of lead generation.  Many of these people call themselves LION’s (LinkedIn Open Networkers), but I will just call them lazy networkers.  They are content to send a form letter or generic message to people asking them to connect with them.  They don’t even send invites any longer (to LinkedIn’s credit they cut off unlimited invites), thy just bother people by sending notes like the one below:

“Hello,

I am reaching out to you as a fellow Mylink500 open networker (or recruitingblogs.com member for that list).  I would love to connect with you to share networks. I do understand that you might choose not to accept my invitation.. I appreciate your time and consideration.   Click here to invite me to connect on LinkedIn.”

Hmm…. I don’t know this person, I could not care less about this guy’s networks (I’m a member of recruitingblogs.com, but as of this message I’m thinking of it more as a spam widget than a site that adds value).  Why on earth would I want to connect with this person?  I guess he didn’t think about that.

So back to what I was saying, I think that LinkedIn really needs to take a pitt stop and figure out how to a) speed things up, and b) spam filter more effectively.  If they don’t then they are going to find themselves facing a slow an silent death as users stop visiting.

There has a been a quiet wave moving across the ocean of social media lately. If you weren’t paying attention, or attending SXSW, then you may have missed it. It is called Twitter, but given the buzz that it has been receiving lately you would not assume that a startup with such an unassuming name was about to challenge big name web properties like Facebook and Linkedin. Twitter has gone viral and is poised to go to the next level. In laymen’s terms for today’s market this means that they are a moving up the web charts rapidly. If you prefer statistics then consider the fact that Facebook has experienced a 119.9% increase in users this year, linkedin has had 417.6% increase; both compared with Twitter’s 1216.8% increase. Still not convinced? Check out this velocity chart from Compete.

“So what does this mean for me,” you ask? It means that Twitter is going to be a household brand in your social circles within a few months — in tech and hipster circles it already is. And that means that everyone from brand marketers to recruiters will be looking at Twitter as a big opportunity. And like any other VC backed company they have investors who want to see a return on their investment. I’m betting that Twitter starts expanding user social profiles and thereby challenges Facebook and Linkedin officially in the very near future. Did I mention that you can use it on your iPhone?

Update:

Someone forwarded this article titled ‘Word of Tweet Marketing’ that some of you may enjoy.

This post titled ‘How to be Popular: Overheard on Twitter #5‘ is worth reading.