The Networking Blog

The financial world is full of secrets, but they are gradually being revealed.  More and more social networking sites are rising. We’ll examine three examples of sites that not only enable networking, but expose financial data. This makes us think – will this transparency reach the big financial institutions? Could the current financial crisis be avoided if the public knew what the bankers were doing?

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: Read more…

There was one big absentee from the annual Super Bowl – Pepsi. They decided to pull away their TV advertising budget from this popular event in social media. Did this bold move succeed? Here are a few aspects of this move.

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The answer you get by any SEO expert on keeping your readers faithful is -have great content! Although writing ‘great content’ is easier said than done, we can use a few simple tools to keep our readers on board with additional content to our own. In this post we will show the use of a few simple widgets that can enhance our blog’s content.

The first advantage of widgets is that they are easy to install and use. You don’t have to be a software designer in order to install a text widget on your site or blog. The second advantage is that most widgets can be customized in size, color and style to fit your blog in an elegant way. In this post I”ll recommend a few content-related widgets, that add relevant content to your readers in addition to your own original content:

Twitter Search Widget – There is no doubt about the impact tweets have on the web. over 50M users tweet daily billions of tweets, why not share the relevant ones for you with your readers? Instead of adding a twitter widget of your own tweets, add the search widget and cutomise it to your blog topic.This example is a search widget on ‘Ipad’

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HootSuite seems like another social network web application. Well, it doesn’t have any killer features that you won’t find elsewhere, but it does have important features that make it a useful tool for networking

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Twitter, one of fastest growing social media tools in 2009. One of the popular uses is promoting content through Twitter. In this post I’ll explore the possibilities of using Twitter with automatic and manual tools.

The first and not recommended option for Twitter users when promoting content is manually tweeting every time you post a blogpost, video, podcast. This is not recommended, especialy when most bloggers post more than once a week at their blog, FaceBook, LinkedIn,etc. and upload a video to YouTube every now and then. You would usually like to tweet on most of that. Luckly, today you can add your Twitter account to most of the existing platforms.

Some of the more simple examples are:

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Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. If you aren’t using one of these social media platforms, now is a good time to start, even if you aren’t big on online socializing. Using social media can help with keeping in touch with your customers and associates. This post explains how.

About a decade ago, a friend bragged about a new phone he just bought, that can hold up to 300 contacts in his address book. This sounds funny when thinking about it in 2009. He then showed me that except for name and phone number you can type in additional details such as city, birthday and mail. To demonstrate the abilities of the new gadget (I remind the readers this is 1999 we are talking about) he showed me a memo the phone just made about one of his customers. The customer’s daughter just turned 16, and my friend called to congratulate his customer for the sweet sixteen birthday party they are holding. We can learn 2 things from this ‘ancient’ story:

1. Know your customers – they will return a favor by doing business with you again.
2. In 2009 there is no need to input your phone manually, we have technology for that!

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Bringing customers to a cafe or a restaurant requires good food, a nice setting and good service among other things. When I sat in a cafe and sent a tweet about it, I discovered a new way to bring returning customers: responding to the tweet in a creative way.

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. Read more…

Naymz is a fast growing professional networking site. Many features are similar to LinkedIn. Here is a list of 4 advantages and 4 disadvantages of Naymz, with many comparisons to LinkedIn.

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Everybody heard about Twitter, the ultra-viral micro blogging service. In future posts we’ll show how to use Twitter for networking. Today we’re going to focus on a by-product of Twitter – Tweetups, or Twitter meet-ups in human language.

Twitter is young: it aired only in 2006, when other social networks were already strong in the market. In the last year or so, it’s popularity leaped worldwide.

The short 140 format makes it easy to use and easy to follow. Naturally, you follow and get followed by people you know. Later you become exposed to more people that share a common interest.

After reaching a critical mass, communities began evolving around the “Twittersphere”. This critical mass means that not only geeks use it, but the general public. So, people that get to know each other via very short messages want to get together in real life. So, tweetups were born.

A Tweetup is a Networking Event

Tweetups are usually held once a month during the evening at a bar. This allows for a relaxed and not to formal atmosphere. But the attendants of this event didn’t solely to drink a beer before going home.

Attendants of tweetups are usually people who want to connect. They come also for meeting their virtual friends in real life, but they usually come with an agenda. The name tags with the @TwitterUser mean that a tweetup is a networking event, not a geek get-together.

Many times, the audience of tweetups has a tendency towards the internet sector, and internet marketing in particular, but it’s not a bunch of programmers…

So, tweetups are significant networking events, and especially important for those of you who want to connect to people in the internet sector.

How can I find out about upcoming Tweetups?

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