Operating and managing your blog’s social media activity can be a lot of work, and it might not be so effective if not done right. Many tools offer badges, widgets and toolbars for blogs and websites, I found the Wibiya toolbar very effective and well designed. We implemented it both on this blog and on Sortfix’s blog.

First of all the Wibiya toolbar has a simple step-by-step plugin installation wizard-

After installation, you can decide which applications to add to it, all done through Wibiya’s site. For Sortfix we decided to implement the company’s Facebook fan page, Twitter account, Flickr and the Youtube channel. The added value here is letting your readers enjoy rich content, only one click away (posts, video, images and tweets), in one place without overwhelming them with information-

The toolbar appears at the bottom of the webpage without interfering with the browsing activity. It enables users to communicate, share and be exposed to more content the site has to offer. I also enjoys the fact that you can use less widgets on the sidebar and keep a more clean view to the page and let the user experience more of your content without leaving the page. Wibiya also has a friendly admin page to manage apps, and view stats.

The only thing missing in my opinion, is a connection to linkedin. Hope will be added soon.

FXStreet is a big forex portal. They have a large audience, many contributors and many business partners. Their CEO, Franscesc Riverola has a blog that is updated almost daily. This is an excellent tool to communicate with readers and business partners.

Riverola takes networking through his blogs one step further: he frequently publishes detailed statistics for the site. While he currently has good numbers to show off, this approach isn’t common in the forex industry and isn’t common at all.

Being too closed and secret has its prices. You would find it hard to communicate with someone that has a lot to hide, and that shows suspicion. Speaking with someone who is constantly looking over his shoulder will also make you suspicious and nervous.

So, I find openness to be a good thing. A positive, open attitude usually prompts the same reaction, and makes networking easier – more trust is earned when you are positive.

Still, Riverola’s approach is quite unique. In most businesses, there are a few secrets, a few things that you won’t expose at all or at least not immediately. Companies that have a website as their main asset usually hold the stats close to them, and will only expose them only to trusted business partners. If they do expose them to the public, they’ll cherry-pick specific numbers and be very creative about it.

Riverola’s numbers fascinate me, as I’m also in the forex publishing business, through Forex Crunch. While I salute his approach, I don’t show all my cards. Am I wise to have some secrets, or is my attitude too conservative for the 21st century?

Picture credit: stuartpilbrow on Flickr.

Part of my work with start-up companies includes finding investors and funds. With time you find that somethings works for you better than others. Of course, these are just my impressions. Hope you’ll find them useful:

1. Your Network - As mentioned here frequently before, use your close network of family and friends to find funding. It’s common for many start-ups who started out in their garage to raise the first amount of money with their family and friends, which often referred to as FFF (friends, family and fools) . Just to get a kick start, make a short and clear presentation and gather up your close friends and family(your living room is fine). This idea has 2 main advantages: The first is you have a great chance to present your idea and get free feedback. The second is, and take this seriously – a true opportunity to raise capital from people who will be suportive and believe in your potential. Take this group of seed investors seriously, and you just might be a step from seeing your idea turn into business.
2. Be prepared – You’ve just launched the works on your new start-up, even took a bank loan, or took your friends and family as small investors. You already have a business plan, you just finished developing the first stage of your application or product. You’ll probably need to find more capital, and look for more investors. Before you do anything else, have at least the following, a short 1-2 pager summary of your business. A few really good images of your application/website and not more than a 10 page powerpoint slideshow. No one can review more than that and stay focused.
3. To the next step – Now that you have a short executive summary, a killer (and short!) powerpoint presentation and the money invested in you by those close to you, your ready to move to the next stage. Make a list of(and this will take time), potential new investors. Who should be on this list? Anyone related to you or your friends with financial means. Look for:
   1. People related to financial organizations such as Venture Capital firms.
   2. Private investor groups. In many cases small and medium investors group up to invest in new businesses.
   3. Big corporates in related industry fields, that might invest or collaborate with your business.
   4. Business Development experts, that raised capital in the past, they will cost you but will save time and can shorten the time you spend in order to raise the funds.
4. Be Creative! Aside from the options listed above, you can search for capital in many places you haven’t thought about. Not only big VC firms or financiers can come up with capital for your start-up. It can be anyone with financial means. The same way you can gather up your family and friends to hear about your great idea, you can do the same with any business person you can find. Ask for a meeting with owners of a retails stores, big agencies or any other kind of business owners. In many cases Business owners are looking for new ways to bring added value to their cashflow, and investing in new start-up can be a great new opportunity for them.

In our next posts I wil give some more input on the subject with actual examples from my experience.

1. What to wear? If you are a man, don’t laugh at this point, this is not a fashion tip! It’s important to wear something suitable for the occasion, but try to wear something comfortable for you. If you usually don’t wear a suit, don’t start now, people will notice you are uncomfortable, and it can be interpreted as unreliable. If you are not sure, and there isn’t a clear dress code, try asking a colleague on similar events. Remember, dress code is important, but feeling comfortable around others is crucial.

Sometimes, dressing wrong for the occasion is serving a purpose…

2. Like Actors – Learn your lines! If you are not a people person, and finding it hard to introduce yourself, do as professional actors do, rehearse and learn by heart. You can implement this method by learning by heart, just like writing your CV. Take the highlights of your work and business actions, and shape them into 3-4 short sentences you can say naturally, short and to the point. My personal example I use in events is say: “I’m a self-employed business developer. currently I’m working on…” .Keep it short and interesting. You can finish these few lines by handing a business card and wait to see if people ask to hear more.

3. Rehearse. Practice makes..well, you know. Again, like actors, a good rehearsal is a great help before the real show. The best way to rehearse on networking is only with the real thing. Try finding prior to your event a smaller one. See if you can find a smaller event (there’s always something), even on a different subject before the event you intend to attend. Go to a smaller gathering, where you preferably know a few people, and try approaching people with the lines you remembered by heart. If it works stick to it, if not, you can still adjust them before the important event.

4. Do your homework. Try making the most out of every event. Study the subjects that will be spoken about, what’s up for discussion? Who is going to attend the event? Study these detail and network with specific new people on relevant subjects to them and yourself.

5. Don’t forget to enjoy. Even business events these days have a fun aspect to them (or at least they try). In most conventions there is a variety of people, eatable food and in many cases, drinks. Think of these events as an opportunity to enjoy yourself, with business as an added value. If people will see you as optimistic and positive, it will ease the networking.

These 5 guidelines should keep you comfortable, confident, positive and interesting enough to network effectively to new connections.

In this blog we dealt with how to built your network, and how to make it grow. Assuming you already have a network of considerable size, it’s time to make it work for you, and for your connections. A non-active network, won’t bring any value to your business. Connection won’t last – the next time you’ll need someone from your network you will have to start rebuilding your relationship from scratch.

One of the best ways to keep your network active and bring value to your business, is connecting between people inside your network. As we said before, a network is based on your family, friends, colleagues and associates. Do these different people know one another? And if not, why should they?

Well, the answer is quite simple. I explained before that people connect to people and not to businesses. If you are the one to connect between people, you bring added value to both parties, and will be remembered positively by both sides. By connecting people you you make a good reputation for yourself and people will appreciate doing business with you. A good example is romantic relationships. Ask couples who introduced them to one another, I’m sure they always remember.

What kind of links can you make? The possibilities are endless. You can recommend a talented family member to a colleague looking to hire. You can connect between a business associate to a supplier who is a close friend. Of-course you can use the example in the the first paragraph and establish a new company based on your network connections, Try thinking which of your network connections could fill a position in a new company (sales, development, marketing, finance).

Following Up

Last but not least, when you do make connections, you must bring added value to the new connection between all sides. Don’t just exchange phone numbers or forward emails. Make sure you follow-up on the new connections you made. Phone both sides, get a feedback, explain why you recommended a certain person above all others. Here are a few more words on the importance of follow-ups by Dave Clarke.

Build strong links between your network connections, all sides will benefit in the long run.

Don’t miss opportunities – When does that big opportunity come? You could never know. In order to avoid missing opportunities, there’s only one thing to do. Take part in activities related to your business and personal life as mentioned here before. Any occasion or person you meet, could easily become a great opportunity  for a big client or  a new contract, or finding the perfect candidate for a job your hiring for.

Then again, some meetings just bring up too many bad memories

Don’t force your  business – Your product is great, I’m sure of that. But try to understand the event you’re participating in. Timing is everything (along with a good product,creative  marketing and some luck…). Sometimes you might just have one opportunity to introduce yourself to someone relevant to you -  don’t blow it. If you speak about your business in the wrong place, you might be considered rude and maybe even boring. From my experience, always introduce yourself first as a person, an individual. Don’t talk about your business straight away. People like to connect with people, not companies. Start by a short introduction about yourself. People will remember you but they will seldom remember a company name. If people will remember you it doesn’t matter which business it is, They would be interested in YOU.

Don’t beat yourself when you’re wrong – We all make mistakes, and we learn from them. You tried to introduce your business to a potential investor and failed. Well, these things happen. When you’re unsuccessful, a few things should be done. First of all, go back and trace your moves. What went wrong? Was it the PowerPoint slides? Were you under-prepared? Understand what can be improved for the next time. Now that you are ready to try again, do it as many times as possible. You failed making connections in a convention? Go to a dozen more. You approached potential costumers and it didn’t work, try doing it better, and this time approach a hundred costumers more.

Never, but NEVER, work ‘on the fly’ – It’s nice being spontaneous when it comes to going out, not for your business. Although networking is not a science as accurate as rocket physics, you can plan your moves wisely. Decided on going to a convention to make new connections?  Wonderful! Is this convention in your field of work? Is there a better one soon? How costly is it? You must ask yourself these questions. Otherwise you will be spending more than you can afford of your time and money.

Don’t underestimate the power of online networking – We wrote here about LinkedIn, blogs and other means of social networking. These tools are already important enough for businesses, and will become even more dominant in our lives. Even if your business is completely offline, you need to start changing it. Be sure your competitors are working on it as we speak. Learn where your line of work is exposed on the web. Learn which blogger writes about your industry. Bloggers write almost about everything, from technology to foreign-exchange , Graffiti and even Hummus. Take a few hours a week and find the places interesting for you on the web and be active there, for reputation, costumers, colleagues and in short Networking.

Advantages:

1. Search Engine Strength: Naymz does very well in search engines. This is very important for reputation management. When someone looks you up on Google or Yahoo and finds content that you control, this helps your personal branding. Naymz content also helps push down web mentions of yourself that you’d prefer not be seen or emphasized. This is definitely the No. 1 reason to sign up for Naymz.
2. Free introductions: Introductions to people that you have no connection to are limited in LinkedIn, and aren’t totally free. In Naymz, it’s all free.
3. Reputation Monitor: Naymz supplies a tool for reputation monitoring across the web, scanning social networks and blogs. This is both interesting and useful.
4. Microblogging: Naymz offers status messages similar to Facebook and fast growing Twitter. This way, Naymz is somewhere between chaotic Twitter and intra-corporation Yammer. It can be quite useful.

Disadvantages:

1. Size: Naymz boasts that it has over one million users. This is enough for signing up, but LinkedIn is much bigger (over 45 million people) and is a synonym with Professional Networking site.
2. Anonymous recommendations: While being anonymous is necessary in some spooky cases, when you’re building your reputation, an identified recommendation is better than an anonymous. Would you trust a faceless person when networking or when hiring someone?
3. Premium Services: While also LinkedIn has premium services, one of these services is disturbing – the detailed visitor tracking. It means that only users that paid Naymz will get to see who visited their profile. This privacy issue doesn’t make me feel so comfortable – I don’t want the user to see that I’ve visited his profile. Also MyBlogLog has the same disadvantage that disturbs many bloggers.
4. No Groups: LinkedIn groups are an excellent and useful feature, that draws me to the site again and again. Naymz doesn’t have this feature, and I find it to be a big disadvantage.

I hope that Naymz will grow and get better. In the meantime, having a profile there is great for reputation management, but still not the best tool for networking.

Read more on how to use LinkedIn.

One of the most useful and effective tools on LinkedIn is recommendations.

LinkedIn recommendation link

On LinkedIn you can recommend or get recommended by any of your connections. Recommendations are added to your public profile, and can be seen by anyone.

Recommendations on LinkedIn profile

Take the time to ask your connections on LinkedIn to write a few kind words about you. The importance here is that your LinkedIn profile is part of your online reputation, seen by people you would like to conduct business with or have them hire you or be your customers. These are the exact people that will see your recommendations if you would have them. In many cases, colleagues, former employers or friends will have no problem recommending you (it doesn’t have to be more than a 4-5 lines). Of course I would suggest writing a few recommendation yourself to help friends and colleagues and to return a favor.

Another important thing is to know about the applications you can add to LinkedIn. There are many around and I will give one as an example I added to my profile. I added the wordpress app a short while ago. This application retrieves new posts from my blog (this blog in this case) and shows a preview of it in my profile.

Wordpress app for LinkedIn

In this way, my blog gets more exposure, and my connections can get closer and know what I’m writing about or what interests me. There are many more linking to other applications outside LinkedIn for many purposes.

In conclusion to the last three posts on LinkedIn, I recommend setting up a LinkedIn user, getting connected with it. Use its features as explained on this blog with recommendations, groups and applications. After a short term of 2-3 months your profile will be a substantial point on your map of business network.

…One last thing, when you need to introduce yourself to new people,  provided your LinkedIn user is up and running, you could export or link in an email your public profile instead of a short CV or abstract. This way people can see everything they need to know about you (and only what you chose to show…). Here is mine.

How to connect to unfamiliar people: LinkedIn is a great and fast way to connect to people you would like to do business with, but haven’t met before. Here are a few ways on how to do it.

First of all, I recommend as a prior step to get connected to all your existing connections as described in my last post: LinkedIn – Increase Your Networking. After doing so, the LinkedIn system will automaticly suggest people you might know, and can be used to connect to people you might want to know. This appears on the upper right side of your screen titled “People you may know”.

LinkedIn - People you may know feature

By clicking the ‘See more’ link below the ‘People you may Know’ box a long list of possible connections will appear. You can approach these connections through a third party, who will be a connection of both of you. You can also approach directly and it would be acceptable if you have a mutual work place or school or any kind of organization.

A good example would be approaching someone you don’t know personally, but heard him speak at a convention, and you might think could help your business. You could start by sending a message on LinkedIn, telling a few words about yourself and your business, write what in the speech was relevant to you, and ask politely to meet in person, talk over the phone, or maybe send some additional information. This way you might just grow your network of connections faster and beyond your current familiar friends and colleagues.

In our next post we will review the recommendations feature on LinkedIn.

I’ll start by advising  anyone who isn’t a user yet, to sign up now. Even If you are not looking for new business opportunities, or looking for a new job, you should consider using this social site. The first and obvious reason is it takes time to build a substantial and meaningful user on any social site whether it’s Facebook, Stumbleupon, a new blog or even Twitter. Linked in is no different in this case. When you will need this application for any professional cause, you would want and need your user to be already active, strong and meaningful so others would want to be connected to you and help you in your business actions.

Well, the first thing after setting your user, is getting connected. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, you start off with the people close to you. Although most of these people are your day-to-day connections that you meet even weekly, they can become a path to new connection. Start by adding your co-workers as connection, other people you know from places you worked for. You can then add friends and family, for example, I had my mother join Linkedin,and become a connection, and now she is using Linkedin for her coaching business. From here on you’ll have Linkedin suggest new connections you might know weekly. Don’t be afraid offering people interesting to you to become a connection, even if you hardly know them. You never know who would need or want to become your connection.

LinkedIn Groups- One of the things I really found useful is the groups you can join, participate in, get information and read on Linkedin. there are groups on a wide range of topics, issues and subjects. from technology to HR, Sports, SEO ,medical issues though legal groups you will find the group right for you. I would advise not to join to many groups, but join the ones related to your field of work, or topics you want to learn about. pic 2-3 groups at first(you can add more at anytime you want) and start reading what other professionals are saying, get to know the people and even add information of your own. This is a great place to know people and make connection far from your local network.

In my next posts we will review more features that can serve your network of LinkedIn such as recommendations, applications and upgrading your profile.