Networking the West with Liz Ryan

Online Networking with the Denver Chamber

By Liz Ryan, 3-01-07

Yesterday was a great day for our 12th or 13th blizzard of the season - I’ve lost track. I looked out the window, and thought “I can’t do this again.” But I did - what could I do? I had to get down to Market Street in Denver to do a presentation on online networking at the Denver Chamber of Commerce.

Once I got there, I was glad to have made it, because of the people (some of whom came even farther than I did through the blizzard) who had come out in the snow to learn about online networking. We talked about LinkedIn, and about my network, called WorldWIT; we talked about email discussion groups on Yahoo!groups, and creating an online persona and making connections. We talked for three hours, but here are ten points that I boiled down, for folks who would rather get their online networking tips in this format than by trudging through snow and ice:

1) You need two types of profiles. One is your LinkedIn profile (www.linkedin.com - it’s free). The other is a pithy, concise and warm (non-marketing-sounding) paragraph about you, that you’ll use in email discussion groups on Yahoo!groups, in the WorldWIT network and in other online forums and discussions. Include enough detail to put across what you’ve done and what you learned from those experiences, but don’t drone on about every company you worked for and every job you’ve held. Be personable - if your personality doesn’t come through your profile, no one will care.

2) There are all sorts of business-focused social networking sites, including OpenBC (now Xing!), ecademy and Soflow, but I strongly recommend that you join LinkedIn as a starting point. With ten million members, LinkedIn is the largest online networking site for businesspeople and a popular starting point for online connection-seekers. Download the LinkedIn toolbar, which will tell you which folks in your Address book (on Outlook) are already using LinkedIn. You can invite them to become your first contacts.

3) You’ll also want to join some email discussion groups. Yahoo!groups is the spot where more email discussion groups are gathered than anywhere else. Use the search bar to find groups that interest you and to join them. Or start your own group! I also lead a network of connected, free email discussion groups, called WorldWIT. You can join the local one (RockyWIT in Colorado, WildWestWIT in Montana, etc.) and start conversing....

4) Online networking has its own rules for protocol. You can write to people out of the blue - people you read about in the newspaper or online, for instance - but you need to show them a compelling reason to give you their time. A great subject line helps: “Susan Smith suggested we meet,” or “Loved your article in the Daily Camera.” When you make contact, by email or by phone, talk about your new acquaintance, not about yourself.

5) Remember the Happy Life principle, which states that the people we’re looking to connect with are already leading Happy Lives without the benefit of knowing us. You can’t reach out to an unknown person and say “Let’s have lunch! I’m in Denver and you’re in Jackson Hole - so let’s meet up in Cheyenne!” If you’re making the approach, you need to go to them.

6) Back on LinkedIn, make connections with people you already know (via the LinkedIn toolbar) and with people you used to work or go to school with (via the Colleagues and Classmates features). Don’t connect to every Tom, Dick and Harry you come across, because having more connections obligates you to helping more people, and you should use the site the way it’s designed, as a way for trusted colleagues to stay connected. Avoid folks who use exclamation points in the NAME field, a gimmick that spells “online connection slut” and should warn you away from such types.

7) As you acquire online networking contacts, you’ll want to keep track of them. Set up your Outlook account to make an Address Book record for every person you send email to. Use ACT! or Excel to keep track of your contacts - you can export your LinkedIn contacts if you want to add them to the roster. There’s a free service called Plaxo that will let you use email to ask people for their latest snail-mail and phone contact info. In online networking, relationships are the biggest thing, but data management is not far behind.

8) Another way to build your online network is to launch an email newsletter and/or a blog. Blogger, of course is the ubiquitous free blogging site; if you plan to launch a blog, keep it up to date and keep it interesting so that people will be inclined to stop by and leave comments. You can do an email newsletter right out of Outlook or you can use a system like aweber or constant contact. If you want to create credibility for yourself and your business, you have to publish your thoughts, and become a trusted advisor to the people you’re looking to have in your network.

9) If you like to write, you can publish articles to www.ezinearticles.com where they will be picked up by site and newsletter publishers. Your articles will include your url and a bio so that your “cred” will be distributed throughout the ‘net with every article of yours that is selected for publication.

10) Remember that online networking is a two-way street. When you build a network, you build a collection of people who can help you but who also look to you for help. Be ready to fulfill networking obligations like making introductions and giving advice. If a networking relationship is too difficult to maintain or two one-sided, you can cut the cord; but you can’t do that too often or too lightly without hurting your networking rep, so make connections with caution.

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