One Reason for Networks

July 15, 2006 · Comments

(Part of me feels like I’ve written this before)

One reason for networking in all its various forms, is that it gives you a much larger base of people to ask questions to, and a better chance to spread the word about things you’re doing that might be of interest to them.

Another reason is to have a lot of people in your network is for when times are great, you can share out what you’re doing and get more connectivity.

For instance, I’ve recently started reaching out to moms, especially moms who are working, thinking about going back to work, or have chosen NOT to work. It’s been exciting seeing the little group get together, and telling them all my plans. I’ve received lots of useful feedback, and I’ve implemented all of it (except I haven’t figured out what to change on those color schemes).

Another example: a friend at work said he wished he could work at the Museum of Science. Turns out, I’ve got a friend there. I connected the two and now we’ll see what happens.

When things are low, it’s nice to have a network to reach and connect with. What if I lose my job? At least I have lots of ways to get the word out, and I hope I’ll have a better chance at finding something that suits my needs. (Reaching out a LOT when things are low isn’t great for either party, so consider that).

I’m excited about the possibilities of knowing more and more of you. As you’ve already learned, when you send me mail or a comment with a reply address, I write back. I love talking with you, learning about your worlds. I feel possibilities from this all the time.

So, thanks gang. For those of you recently hit by my Linked-IN wave, thanks for saying yes. For those who haven’t seen that and who use Linked-IN, my address of record there is: linkedin at chrisbrogan dot com. (Add me?)

Let’s really grow this network into something we can all enjoy, and take advantage of.

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  • Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! lfhzkrfmcp
  • Interesting - thank you, Christopher. I'll look into it!

    - Sonya
  • 7th floor - check out LinkedIn, sort of a professional version of MySpace. Don't get me wrong, drunken teenagers are pretty funny, but LinkedIn will probably do better for you. I've had an account on there for a while, but only very recently got serious about it, and now I'm suddenly looking at it with very new eyes. It may well be better than the broad, shallow approach, particularly for finding jobs. A couple of quick tips:

    [1] Use GMail for all your correspondence. Why? GMail auto-saves all the people you ever send mail to. Then it's easy to export the address list and import into LinkedIn. You may suddenly find yourself in touch with former colleagues, etc. that you'd long forgotten about.

    [2] Get really good at extracting contacts from your existing mail archives. Everything from a perl script to extract email addresses to commercial software can do this for you. Load it up into LinkedIn.

    Beware, of course, of those contacts with whom you may have burned bridges.

    Christopher S. Penn
    Daily financial aid internet radio on demand, no iPod required
    http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
    Got iTunes? http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/subscribe/
    Need loans? http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/studentloan/
  • Chris, what's your opinion on using existing social networking sites? We all remember Friendster, but it's a dinosaur now; MySpace is full of drunken teenagers; Tribe got kind of lost in the shuffle; sites like Flickr are great but oriented towards a specific idea. Do sites like Blogger fill the gap for professional adults who want to network?
  • Meg
    You and Rob are so weird. Check out his post.

    So funny.

    (sorry about the dup post below)

    Megin
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