Apr 10
30
Effectiveness Online
Networking is supposed to be fun but with the growing number of Social Networks and profiles we have to keep up to date, the commercialization of platforms and the huge amounts of spam and other uninteresting or even damaging crap we are bombarded with: is it still…fun?
Networking makes a lot of sense for business but if it involves spending a lot of time dealing with unproductive relations, anoying people, or activities that could potentially damage your brand: it simply doesn’t.
So: how do we bring the fun back into networking and at the same time have it make sense business wise?
How do we spend our time online as productively and pleasantly as possible?
It all depends on how you set up and manage your online presence. If you set yourself some clear goals and organize the way you manage your online presence it should be even more fun then before because usability and diversity of online services are improving all the time: networking potential is greater.
Select Or Aggregate
But how to manage this growing diversity? The basic choice is between being selective or aggregating as many services as possible in one or a few online interfaces. The architecture of online services in many cases seems to be based on this simple choice: specialize or aggregate.
There are many specialized Social Media Service on the web as well as many niche-networks for business, a few examples:
On the other hand we find many new services that act as aggregators, enabling you to collect all your online media in one place:
The larger online brands that dominate the Social Media market are increasingly integrating these two approaches:
The Best Of Both Worlds
If the market makers (Google,Facebook) are combining the best of both worlds they do so to supply a level of convenience which will make it more logical to choose between them: Google or Facebook, Friendfeed or Buzz etc. and give them control of our data. But do we really want to make a choice between them and give them control of our data?
At least from a commercial point of view it makes perfect sense to be present on multiple platforms regardless of the brand behind it. From a strategic and marketing point of view it makes a lot of sense to control our own data.
But: by not making such a choice we give ourselves a lot of extra work, setting up complicated technological infrastructures,networking and nonsense to filter through. Basically: we force ourselves to spend a lot of time in an inefficient, unproductive manner.
Unless…
Is this really necessary? What if we could have secure access to all our online contact data, files, channels, projects and folders from our desktops and have a single interface to initiate our networking activities from? What if we could also link all these activities to all the individuals we deal with online in a significant manner and engage them through all appropriate channels at all times?
Instead of having:
We could instead:
Socialize, don’t Agonize
By taking control of our online data and having access to it in a single place we could:
With these considerations in mind The HOB Solutions developed an Online Service which puts you in control of your data, your contacts and your time: The HOB Networker PRO. Find out more about this service by viewing this presentation.
About the author: Job Folbert is the CEO/founder of Imocial. Join his network or contact Job directly:
E-Mail: blog@thehob.biz
Network: http://hobhub.biz
Main site: http://www.thehob.biz 
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