The New Face of “Net”working

 

 Social media keeps creeping back into many of my postings. But, I can’t help it. I use it each and everyday for a variety of purposes. I am a sales person I know how incredibly important networking is. But, the face of networking is changing rapidly with the introduction of social networking media crossing over from the consumer world to the business world.  This means that professional relationships will be created and explored in a whole new way.

Just in the last 6 months I have noticed an exponential growth in the number of people I know using Facebook and LinkedIn. I think both of these are excellent resources to combine the business and social world. But they are changing the way we network in positive and negative ways.

I can use LinkedIn to display my resume, current job title, and other accolades. I can also use it to connect to other professionals I have met in person at various networking events and other occasions. It’s a great way to keep an online roster of clients, friends, colleagues, business partners, and more.

 Linked in is fabulous for virtual networking because you can see who your connections are connected to. You can search by company name and find people in various roles in a company, you can search by geographic area, you can pick a specific job field; all of these aspects are incredibly helpful when you are trying to build a back-story about a potential client. Plus, you may find a person you would like to connect to, but don’t want to make a cold call. You can look at your connections and see if anyone you know had any relationship with this person and then get introduced via email.

In many of the same ways, Facebook holds a tremendous amount of merit as well. Facebook originated as a networking site exclusive to college students and has grown into a social networking site open to anyone. Facebook is, in many ways, a dressed up version of  MySpacewith a dash of LinkedIn.

Facebook, unlike LinkedIn, allows users to express more about their personal side but leaves opportunities with endless widgets (you know those fun applications you can add to express your individuality) for the purposes of personal and professional uses.  I have an RSS feeder for this blog as well as news articles from places I like to get news. But I also have silly quotes, pictures, and other non-business elements. I think this could be construed as good and bad. The majority of my Facebook contacts are friends peppered with a growing number of business contacts. The upside: business contacts get a glimpse of me as a real person vs. a sales person. The downside: business contacts get a glimpse of me as a real person vs. a sales person. So one must be conscientious of content. I actually had to admonish a friend for writing inappropriate remarks on my Facebook wall (which is public for any of my contacts to view).

So, what does all of this mean for networking? Well, the way that people get introduced, as well as maintain relationships (both personal and professional), is changing. There is so much information out there through social networks as well as other web based applications that, in a way, networking has become streamlined. But at what cost? How does this new style of networking fair against good old fashioned chit-chat?

 

We have yet to see how the dynamic of the business relationship will change through these relatively new media tools. Will customers and service providers become ironically, “faceless”, despite Facebook? We have yet to see the ramifications of these networking trends. I predict that person-to-person interaction will suffer at the hands of the virtual relationship. We will see……