Coach Powell's Ninety Day Power Play » facebook

Should you invite people into your social media networks if you don’t know them personally?

Dan Kolansky — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:23:59 +0000

Anyone can be your “friend” these days. Social media networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have fairly loose policies (read: almost non-existent) about who can connect with who and so people are inviting other people into their networks all the time who they don’t actually know.

Is this a wise practice? Well, lets take a look at the pros and cons:

Pros

You will be connected to waaaayyyy more people, which opens up your reach of who you can contact and communicate with.
You will be able to browse more information for doing research.
You will be able to keep tabs on a larger segment of the online population.
Opportunities will become available to you because you will notice someone updating with status, or asking a question, or something that alerts you to a golden chance you would have missed otherwise.

Cons

Well…. one big con. You won’t know anyone in your online network, so your connection to them is one step above meaningless.

Some people go with a smaller, but more tight knit network. Others connect with everyone and their brother, hoping that mass builds their network.

What are your thoughts? Are you an open networker, or a closed networker? Let us know in the comments below!

-Coach Kolansky

How effective is facebook for business networking?

Dan Kolansky — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:02:26 +0000

There are many people out there you view facebook as “for personal use only.” They avoid facebook for business use like the plague. The interesting thing, though, is that facebook has many tools for fabulous networking on the social networking website.

So when I am prompted with the question: “how effective is facebook for business networking?” My response is, very effective.

The trick is to first actually start using it for business.

It is important to understand where facebook came from in order to understand where it is going.

Facebook began as a social site for a few people at Harvard university to post up pictures of themselves to participate in “hot or not” style quizzes. It moved from its humble beginnings to become quite impressive as a college only social networking website.

Only two years ago, the site opened up its doors to the general public and allowed others to participate on the site.

Since then, the people at Facebook have been adding all kinds of new features and enhancements to the site in order to better accomodate a larger population of people hanging out at facebook.com.

With this in mind, you can see that Facebook is ever expanding into new areas, and one of these areas is business. The site now supports a wide variety of ways to advertise your business and yourself on facebook. So take advantage of it, its there for the taking!

Post your thoughts in the comments below. I know I have quite the opinion, but I understand that there are other opinions out there. What do you think?

Keeping your success in focus,
-Coach Kolansky

How effective is facebook?

Dan Kolansky — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:08:03 +0000

Facebook.com is one of the biggest phenomenon’s to hit the web since google. From a networking standpoint, though, how good is facebook, really?

I’ll tell you, from my perspective, facebook is amazing as a way to keep consistent communication going with all of my networks. Of course, I’m one of those people who is willing to tie together their business contacts with their personal contacts — not everyone wants to be that way.

But if you are not willing to share your facebook account with your business contacts, then they won’t be participating in your brand as much as you might like.

What do you think about facebook? Does it stand up to the heat of networking? Hit us up in the comments below.