The Web 2.0 revolution is reaching the financial sector. It’s not only forums and chat rooms, and not another Twitter application for stocks. This time it’s about revealing trades in real time. One sector is standing out: forex. Trading currencies has been around for a few decades, but it was limited to big financial institutions. The internet, among other things, brought this niche of financial investment (or speculation if you wish) to the masses.

“Show me the money”

There’s lots of innovation around forex trading platforms, so this served as good ground for networking sites as well. In 2009 and 2010, these networking sites went deeper – deep into the pockets of investors. Similar to applications such as Google Latitude that expose your geographical location, these sites expose data. But it’s not only forex. Let’s see some examples:

1. MT4Pips: These are lots of weird names in Web 2.0, and this name is not only Web 2.0-ish, but uses the forex jargon. MT is MetaTrader, the leading software in this field. Using this site, traders that use this specific software can share their real live trades between each other. This site comes from a company that already made a Digg-like site for forex, has a forums site and more social sites in this field.  The options are somewhat basic, and are limited to this specific platform, but are a great and neat start. Here’s a deeper review of this site.
2. Currensee: Focusing only on the forex sector, this site enables sharing of real time trades and has tools for aggregating the numbers and showing the big picture. While this isn’t limited to a specific software, not all the brokers in the industry are available there. They are adding more and more brokers, and improving the design, so this will probably emerge as the leading tool for social networking in forex. But we guess that most of you aren’t investing in this specific niche but rather in stocks. The last options supports more sectors.
3. PT Multistation: This is a software that enables traders to use multiple brokers at once. They recently added social features that allow traders (in foreign exchange, stocks and others) to chat and also to share real trades. This tool already allows multiple brokers and goes beyond the niche of forex, but the social features still require improvement, according to this review. Also here, a good direction that still needs polishing.

All in all, we have nice starts here with each one taking a different direction. We hope that this trend of transparency will reach stock sites as well. Do you know of any sites like these? We’d love to hear.

Further reading: Is showing all your cards always the right choice?

HootSuite is a web application that can be used for managing multiple accounts in multiple social networks. The most obvious is Twitter. You can manage many Twitter accounts, which makes it useful if you’re promoting many businesses in separate accounts.

I’m certain you aren’t impressed. There are loads of web applications, such as Brizzly, which enable multiple accounts, and lots of desktop applications such as Tweetdeck. The main advantage of HootSuite regarding Twitter is the ability to schedule tweets.

Scheduling of tweets is enabled for manual tweets as well as for automatic ones. Instead of instantly tweeting about all your blog posts, you can set HootSuite to have a minimal period of time between tweets. This is good for not coming too strong – a concept we’ve discussed over and over again, such as this post about befriending too soon in Facebook.

This way, your followers will see sporadic tweets even if they are automated. Yes, there’s an auto-tweeting plugin for Wordpress, but HootSuite can schedule, spread the tweets and also append different words to the links. This makes it much more friendly to your followers, giving also the automated tweets a personal touch, which is so needed in a world of too many Twitter Autopilots.

LinkedIn, Facebook and more

HootSuite isn’t only about Twitter. You can use it to control status updates in your Facebook profile, your Facebook pages and LinkedIn, the leading tool for business networking. I wonder if they’ll support Naymz in addition to LinkedIn.

Another feature that is available is an option to link it to Ping.fm which opens up more social networks, such as Yammer, MySpace, FriendFeed and more. I find this unnecessary, as you can easily lose control and lose the personal touch.

Does Twitter bring traffic?

That’s a good question that receives long discussion all over the web. While you can separately measure the traffic in your websites, HootSuite takes a different approach of measuring the clicks on the tweets themselves. You can see clicks by tweets, web pages and more.

I found that repeating the intro “New blog post” for automated tweets from blog posts tend to receive less clicks over time. Playing with different intros seemed to gain more traction. More click mean a better connection with the people who follow you, and a better chance of enlarging the network via retweets.

As aforementioned, HootSuite doesn’t have anything revolutionary, but it has a nice package of features. An excellent example for a trivial but useful feature is the “Hootlet” – it enables instantly tweeting about a webpage you like. Trivial? Sure. Exists elsewhere? Sure. Useful? Yes.

No big flaws

When preparing this review, I ran into this review on Twitip. Apart from the interesting review, many commented with criticism about the ow.ly shortening tool. This is the tool that HootSuite uses for shortening and for the useful stats. During my research, ow.ly worked flawlessly. So there;s no significant downside in HootSuite.

All in all, it’s a useful tool for networking, free to try and free to use.

1. Basic Networking: Like everything, we have to start at the beginning. This posts lays out the foundations of networking.
2. How to grow your network – Get a dog – Out of all the different ways to network, this is our favorite, and most friendly way.
3. How not to network in LinkedIn – There’s no good without bad – this is an important post about what not to do.
4. Naymz – LinkedIn for reputation management: We’ve dedicated many posts to LinkedIn, but it’s not alone. Here’s the best competitor, which should be taken into consideration.
5. 4 Web and Business Myths – We’re talking about networking on a web site, so web business myths are a subject we had to address, and do a reality check.

Have a great 2010!

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.

Picture credit: Chris Brogan

I sat with my laptop at Tazza D’Oro, a nice cafe-restaurant in Tel Aviv, best know for its excellent breakfasts. As I was waiting for a meeting, I sent out a tweet about sitting in this cafe. Reporting from everyday life is common amongst geeks, and I’m no different.

I was surprised to see a reply from Yotam, the owner of the place, that asked me to ask for him, since he couldn’t recognize me from my picture. Well, the waiter called him and we had a nice chat.

He told me that he’s looking for creative ways to get more people to his place. The method that he chose wasn’t advertising or special offers. He chose networking.

Why should I come to his cafe rather than the one next door? The reason. as Yotam explained to me was the people. Now, when I sip a cup of coffee or have lunch at Tazza D’Oro, it’s not just sitting at the place, it’s sitting at Yotam’s place.

The personal touch is what will make customers return. This is an ancient method. The technology is new Twitter. By monitoring mentions of his place on Twitter, he can see what people are saying, respond to them, and also approach them physically if they’re there.

This is a great example of using the networking technology to network in real life. The place also hosted a tweetup recently. This might have been the trigger for him to start using Twitter.

Twitter isn’t the only tool around, and it might not always be suitable for everyone. We’ll later review another place that uses Facebook to keep in touch with customers. Bon appetite!

How do you join groups? First thing, decide what are your fields of interests are. What does your business do? Real-estate, law, consulting? In almost any subject you’ll find groups and subgroups with many professionals in them. People (like you) on each group are looking to hire, talk and write on the selected topic. In other words, people are looking to connect – to network.

Groups Search on LinkedIn

Once you join a group, you can get noticed by participating in conversations. You can get notified by mail on conversations that interest you. You can start a conversation yourself. You could approach people by leaving a comment on conversations, sending a message, and eventually becoming their connections on LinkedIn.

Here are some of the groups I found useful and with great contacts, that I joined lately:

Social Media Today – All about the world of social media, tactics, conversations and the people of the relatively new industry. The group is a part of the Social Media Today website. Recent conversations are about social media for businesses, legal issues on social media and etc. I found the group very effective and useful. The people participating there are pros, have great insights and some of them became my connections.

The Blog Zone – A group for bloggers- a group all about blogs, bloggers, blog content. One of its subgroups is The Bloggers Bulletin. This is a blog platform hosting a few bloggers and their content on a variety of topics.

Business Development – A group with discussions on sales, producing revenue and business development for companies.

Search for groups that interest you, and start being active. The networking will happen by itself.

Facebook Networking Done Wrong

When a person you don’t know befriends me on Facebook, I politely ask the obvious question: Do I know you? When I have the patience, I also add a few more words, such as: We have mutual friends, but I don’t seem to recall you.

Many of these people aren’t serious and ignore my message. After two or three days, I reject their friend request. I don’t know them, and they missed their chance of explaining me why they want to befriend me.

Recently I’ve encountered many cases of a different sort: they respond to my message, telling me that they have a blog they want me to read or a page to become a fan of.

I would be quite reluctant to befriend someone using this approach. Facebook friends are not necessarily friends in real life. Some people have many hundreds of friends, and some have thousands. Despite this fact, Facebook users don’t automatically approve friend requests from anonymous people. This may be rightfully considered as spam – Facebook spam.

Facebooking – a better approach

If they want to promote their blog, the least they could do was check out my Facebook profile and see that I also have a blog. Having spent this minimal effort, they could check out my blog, read a post or two and respond there with the address of their blog. I would expect them to respond to the post and not just promote their blog. This issue deserves a post of its own.

If I didn’t have a blog linked from my Facebook profile, approaching me on Facebook isn’t ruled out. The better way to do it is send a message on Facebook. A message would work much better as a first step of networking for someone anonymous.

A polite message, stating that they don’t know me, but think I might be interested in checking out their blog could work. If I get too many messages like this, I might ignore them, but I may also respond to such a message and indeed pay a visit to their blog.

Sending a message can work out as a first step of networking in Facebook. Sending a friend request will probably be rejected.

Further reading:

• Networking on LinkedIn
• Networking to MySpace

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.

A birthday party can be an excellent ground for networking. For example, you might be a colleague of the birthday boy (or girl), and other guests can be relatives, college friends, co-workers from another place or from a totally different background.

These people from different backgrounds get to know each other at the birthday, and this offers networking opportunities.  There might be a business opportunity with another attendant of this event. You already have some basic common ground – you know the birthday boy.

This common acquaintance is the first possible topic of conversation, that can lead to other topics, and perhaps some business opportunities. The conversation may lead to talking about further meetings and the exchange of business cards.

At such event, the mingling continues, and you might miss out on exchanging business cards. Well, if you’re interested in connecting, you can still reach out via your mutual friend. This mutual friend can also supply more information about the person you talked to. It naturally goes both ways…

After being friends with someone for a long time, you already get to know his friends which you meet at his birthday, or his other events. Sometimes the guest list repeats itself. While seeing familiar faces is nice, the networking opportunities decrease.

Shared Events

Your birthday is coming up, and you feel like throwing a party for your friends. You’ll feel very comfortable with your close friends. That’s great! But maybe you don’t wish to repeat the same ritual year after year. Sometimes you’ll prefer to skip the party. How about a party with a wider set of people?

I have a friend who was born a week after me. Last year we had the idea of making one party for the both of us. The first advantage is that the burden of organizing the party was shared between the both of us. This made things easier.

And what we’re here to talk about is networking. My friend and myself have common friends. I also have friends that aren’t his friends or acquaintances, and the other way around.

The party that we threw together last year was and opportunity for many people to get to know new people. I’m glad to say that it was also very fun, so we hope to repeat the success this year. We already know each other’s close friends, but we aren’t familiar with all the acquaintances.

So, also this year’s party is a chance for our guests and also for ourselves to meet new people and to network, apart from having fun of course…

This week we’ve discovered that even a very short taxi ride can be an opportunity for making connections. My girlfriend took a short taxi ride in town. You know how taxi drivers like to talk  - they’re born with excellent networking skills.

This specific taxi driver that took my girlfriend happens to make a living also from real estate. He started the conversation by showing noting that some new buildings that they passed upon are very expensive. This triggered a conversation about the prices of houses in the city.

In any taxi ride you can develop a conversation about the price of homes, sports and some healthy complaining about the government. This taxi driver had an agenda. He had a reason for triggering his passengers to talk about house prices.

In the case of my girlfriend, the rant about rising house prices was fruitful. My girlfriend and myself are looking for a apartment to rent together in the coming months. The talk about houses in the city lead her to mention this fact. The taxi driver jumped on the opportunity and told her about his other occupation.

Now she was more interested to hear about this issue from his knowledge. At the end of the ride, he offered her his business card, and she was glad to take it and keep it.

I’m not sure if we’ll use his services when we’ll do an extensive search for an apartment. We might use his services in searching but might strike a deal through someone else. But we still have a great story about networking.

As shown here, networking can happen anywhere.

We can also learn from this taxi driver’s style – he began the chat by talking about something on the route. After some discussion, his potential client showed interest in his business, and he presented it. And at the end he “made the move” with his business card.

This elegant networking is quite impressive.