Not so long ago, IBM advertised the possibility of selling one guitar to every person on the Internet as the ultimate small-business opportunity. Today, when goods and services can be delivered anywhere, the real online opportunity is in relationships, which can be converted into social capital, real revenue and fruitful relationships as you become a trusted broker in online markets. Your connections are as important as your revenue stream, because they will contribute to the flow of cash you or your company earns.

With business networking tools, such as LinkedIn, Xing, Plaxo, Ryze, Konnects and Biznik, available for free, anyone can weave themselves into the global economy—though they must think about the quality and depth of relationships they can reasonable maintain before jumping into these markets.

The “business” networks are just one component of a social presence on the Web for a business or businessperson. You may want to combine the business networks with Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and blogging efforts. I wrote a long article at ZD Net about when why a company may want to have bloggers writing on their behalf that supplements this discussion, but the long and short of it is, doing business on the social network takes forethought and a realistic sense of what you can accomplish with the time available. You shouldn’t, for example, try to build a global business if you don’t have the ability to travel or deliver product internationally. In short, be real: About who you are and what you can do.

Think of yourself at the center of several concentric circles, the closest ring includes your intimate business colleagues, customers and partners with whom you frequently exchange information and on whom you rely, at least in part, for verification of your credentials and reputation. Beyond that is the circle that includes loose largely unknown affiliations, including the members of your extended business network, the people at your company you don’t know, the friends of friends, your customers’ friends and partners—everyone who, if you could find the right context, you could strike up a conversation at a party based on a common connection, even at a couple degrees remove from you. Finally, there is a big wide world of potential connections that you haven’t explored and don’t even realize are available, in which you’d happily dip a fishing line to see what bites. These three realms of social interaction can all be addressed with a little effort.

Now, I’m not going to tell you exactly what to do, because how you network is your personal signature (there will also be links to thoughtful articles about business networking at the end of this posting). The important point to understand is that social networking tools allow you to reach any of these circles of actual or potential business connections. Just like you would not treat your friends like strangers, insisting on handing them a business card each time you meet, you need to know when you want to communicate and the message you want to send to be effective.

Your first step is to pick a business networking site that will be your home base. The obvious choice would seem to be the biggest business network, LinkedIn. But there is the question of geography and the opportunity to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond to consider. If you are doing business in Europe and Asia, Xing may be a better choice than LinkedIn at this writing, because you’ll be connecting to a network focused on those continents more than the U.S. Likewise, if you decide to work from Konnects, Ryze, Biznik or a nationally oriented network, such as IndiaBusiness.net, those sites can be better if you want to concentrate on building a specific brand in their forums, where fewer people may be competing for attention. LinkedIn, however, is the emerging giant of this market, and you won’t be making a mistake in investing your time in that site as a home base.

Your home base will serve as:

• Your “master online profile,” which you’ll manage carefully and point to like a business card and resume;
• Your primary marketing platform for online brand-building;
• Your main contact management tool.

Spend the same care on creating your home base profile that you would your resume or curriculum vitae. On LinkedIn, for example, you can ask for colleagues and former employers or customers to recommend your work. Many members of LinkedIn and other business sites rely heavily on the number and quality of recommendations for a member when making the initial judgment about whether to establish a connection.

Finish your profile before you start initiating new connections. At the right, you’ll see the first impression made by one of the greatest business networkers in the world, Joi Ito, makes on his LinkedIn profile (the full-size image can be viewed by clicking). Can you reduce those first few lines of information about yourself into a succinct statement about your qualifications? Work at it.

While building your profile, you’ll find you need to invite members of your business network to join the site so that they can give you recommendations. Import your contacts and invite people to join you in sharing business connections, so that your own network begins to grow organically, based on your existing relationships. Be patient, be polite, because people get plenty of invitations to join social networks and you need to be clear about why you want them to join and what you can do together on the network. These invitations will also lay the groundwork for using your online networking to reinforce your physical business network.

And I mean finish that profile before you begin networking with new contacts. Incomplete profiles, badly written text or any indication of carelessness will hurt your networking efforts. You’ll add to the profile after it is complete, but you will not get a second chance to make a first impression on new contacts.

You’ve finished your profile, uploaded your contacts and begun to make online connections with friends. How do you begin to grow that network to include the people with whom you’d like to do business?

Conversations are the best place to be introduced at a party, and the same goes in social networking. that’s why every business network has worked to create discussion on their site. For example, LinkedIn has an “Answers” section where people can exhange ideas about questions offered by members, while Biznik has done a very good job of creating a rich discussion with postings by members. Join in. Contribute to those discussions and, when you’ve made an interesting contact, with some back-and-forth communication with other members, invite those people to become part of your network.

Don’t expect to send a huge wave of invitations to become your connection and find yourself exchanging email with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Look at where your existing connections are participating in discussions on the site and join them. You can also look at the online discussion going on around people you’d like to meet, then begin to talk with them. If you take your time, deliver value to people along the way, you may eventually find yourself introduced to Gates or Buffett.

Many people make the mistake of “over-friending,” inviting hundreds or thousands of people to become friends. In business, that can occasionally be useful, but the value of each connection will be measured by the other party, as well, and if those people see they are one-in-500 or one-in-5,000, don’t expect them to treat the relationship as special.

There is a reason to think in terms of big numbers when building a network. The science behind social interaction has made clear the value of loose connections that can link two communities and, suddenly, galvanize a movement. In business networks, there is an established role for these loose connectors–they are called “rainmakers” and “recruiters,” both skills that depend on knowing a vast number of people and who to connect to create value. Most people are not in a position to make use of a large network of shallow relationships, but if you are, go nuts. The rest of us need to be selective about our business relationships.

Establishing your expertise publicly is the most efficient way to make new meaningful connections. Post articles and answer questions diligently. Additionally, make some time each day to explore the forums to reply to comments, making a point to link back to your postings. Those articles are, like the marketing materials handed out at trade shows, become your business’ entrance on the social network.

If you look back at the concentric circles drawn earlier, we’ve covered two of the circles: Your active network and the unfamiliar market in which your inactive connections can be easily activated. Daily or weekly participation on your home business network will start to develop these networks into real transactional muscle.

Reaching the larger world, the market you don’t know or connect with today, is more complex. Your home business network may not be enough to support your relationships globally. Adding a presence on other business-oriented networks will help, though it also means you must invest additional time in maintaining the quality of those profiles and activity streams.

A novel form of business networking is emerging in the non-business social tools, such at Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed, among other micro-blogging tools. These networks don’t require as much formality (if that is the right word for what happens on the Web before the emergence of “formal manners”) and you can often subscribe to someone’s feed without becoming a friend first. Businessweek writes here about 18 CEOs who use Twitter to keep in front of their customers.

When you start out on Twitter or Friendfeed, look up people you admire or who you would like to be connected to, and start following their feeds. Some will follow you in response, but at the very least you begin to hear their ideas and have the chance to respond occasionally. And dig into the feeds they follow to learn more about the market. There is a smorgasbord of free intelligence out there.

Twitter and Friendfeed, when used for business, is a hybrid of advertising and business cards. Your micro-blog postings can be scattered around, but they need a call to action. You have the opportunity to send a branded message and create some value. That means thinking a bit about the messages you send.

The most successful use of micro-blogging will include a pithy thought and a link, so that people who follow your feed have the chance to click and engage with your message, or an article that reinforces your message. That’s why many CEOs and executives who Twitter or use Friendfeed will point to articles all day long–each time, someone is reminded of their companies’ core messages or the value of paying attention to them. In short, you keep the door to doing business with you open all the time.

Smart People talking business networking:

Guy Kawasaki, famed evangelist and investor, takes a promiscuous view of Twitter. Follow anyone who follows you, Guy says here. Guy also provides an excellent primer on using Twitter to market your business, yourself or your brand here:

“Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.”

Give use your ideas and links to the best advice about business networking in comments, and we’ll add those links-along with a link to your blog or business profile.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Lenovo Feature Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.