My Networking Tools

I hope your holidays went well. We had an enjoyable time visiting family and celebrating the holidays. The holidays are always a good time to get back in touch with your friends, family, and acquaintances. Many follow the time honored tradition of mailing out Christmas cards. Some have used e-mails and e-cards to share their holiday greetings. The holidays are just a great time to reconnect.

This reconnection with friends, family and acquaintances is nothing more than networking. Networking is about relationships. I won’t go into how to network or how you use your network but I want to discuss some of the tools used to maintain your network. In my opinion, networking is about what you can do for people, not what they can do for you. I believe it is all about giving and helping.

We all have different ways we maintain our networks. The tools to stay in touch have dramatically changed over the years. In the days before e-mail and cell phones, we wrote letters. We limited our long distance phone calls due to the expense. For those of us who deployed overseas, mail call was one of most anticipated events of the day. A ten day turnaround from a mailed letter was considered a short. Imagine today if it took you ten days to get an answer to your questions? How did we survive?

Today we use e-mail, cell phones, blogs, instant messaging (IM), micro blogs, and social networking services. There a number of tools available to help in networking. I am going to focus on tools I use on an everyday basis and these are my recommendations. As a disclaimer, I have nothing to do with these products nor am I being compensated in any form for any recommendation.

I use MS Outlook for e-mail, scheduling, task management and contact management. This is the mainstay of my networking tools. There are several applications you can use to augment Outlook’s functionality. I will only touch on those apps that interact with the other networking tools.

Plaxo is a cloud based, smart address book. It will track feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of other sites. It can upload and aggregate contact information from the most popular contact management systems for free. For a fee, you sync your data across these contact management system and most of the smart phones on the market. One of the features I like is tracking birthdays of your contacts and gives you advance notice of upcoming events. http://www.plaxo.com/

Business Cards are a required item for networking. You should always have a business card with you. As you meet people at networking events, church, the gym, or the kid’s soccer game it is always easier to pass out a business card with your contact information. There are several vendors who produce quality, inexpensive business cards. I use http://vistaprint.com/ . They usually have good deals on business cards and other printed products.

LinkedIn is a business and professional networking site. This is a great networking site for business as well as job seekers. Within LinkedIn, there are groups associated with specific professions, locations, companies and job skills. I would say you have to have a LinkedIn profile. http://press.linkedin.com/about

Most people are familiar with Facebook. More people are using Facebook to professionally network and market businesses. Facebook has about 61% of the market share based on hits in 2010. I use Facebook for personal social networking. http://www.facebook.com/

These are the main tools I use to maintain my network. There are many more tools available to monitor your network. New applications are being developed every day. See this Wikipedia link for a compiled list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

I used to be well connected with my network early in my professional career. However, due to lots of reasons, none of them good, I let my network die. My contact list became a list of people I knew versus a network of mutually beneficial relationships. Keep touch with your network. Help people and they will return the favor.

Let me know what you think!

Take Care,
Ron