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Archive for category: Business Networking
Young Business Leaders Event
Posted by: Frank Ableson in General Business, Company News, Business Networking, Social Media, Social Networking, Sussex County, Community on April 13, 2010
MSI's President, Frank Ableson, participated in a panel of Young Business Leaders gathered in the Atrium of the Performing Arts Center at Sussex County Community College to discuss a variety of marketing and public relations topics. Other panelists include Rich Zeoli, Jim Ferguson and David Fink. Attendance was moderate, but with a nice cross section of Sussex County Chamber of Commerce members.
David shared content related to brand strategy. Jim discussed the challenges faced by Newton Hospital in the constantly changing healthcare market. Rich shared some insights on how to become an "expert" in your field. Frank shared some best practices of leveraging your Social Networks.
The event was covered by the New Jersey Herald.
The event was sponsored by the Young Business Leaders Committee of the Sussex County Chamber of Commerce and moderated by Steve Skorski.
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Sussex County Magazine
Posted by: Frank Ableson in Economy, General Business, Business Networking, Sussex County, Community on August 25, 2009
This year's Sussex County Magazine was recently published and is available on the Sussex County Chamber of Commerce website. Thanks to Tammie and her staff for the opportunity to share some thoughts on leadership in this edition.
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10 Steps to using LinkedIn for your job search
Posted by: Jason Matyas in Education, Career Resources, General Business, Business Networking, Social Media, Social Networking on August 18, 2009
1. Build your profile: Include as much detail as possible. Sell yourself using the Summary block. Use important key words. Get your Profile Completeness rating to 100%. Customize a vanity URL with your name, like www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmatyas.
2. Build your network: Import your email address book into LinkedIn and invite everyone you know to connect to you, even if they're not currently using LinkedIn. Search for people you know from previous jobs or schools. Personalize invitations, especially to people that you found on LinkedIn - talk about them and why you think connecting would be mutually beneficial.
3. Get recommendations: Ask former coworkers and colleagues to recommend your past work and your unique talents and abilities. Do the same for them. Be specific in your request with some suggested items for them to mention that are important to your story.
4. Join Groups: Find LinkedIn Groups that are in your area of expertise and join them. Connect with people in those groups. Start and join discussions in them - this increases your visibility to others that you are not currently connected to.
5. Put your vanity URL on your resume: This gives hiring managers awareness of your level of sophistication and allows them to view your profile and let you sell yourself through your profile.
6. Find out where people with your background are working: Use the advanced search feature to search by keyword, location, industry, and more.
7. Search for Jobs: Use the JobsInsider to search for jobs and find people that are connected to the company or decision makers.
8. Research companies: Find out more about the company, especially who works there, if you know anyone that works there now or did in the past, and help prepare yourself for any interviews.
9. Use your LinkedIn status: Make it known to your network that you are actively looking for a job and post updates on your progress as reminders. Others can keep you in mind and might give you the lead to the perfect job.
10. Participate in LinkedIn Answers: Contribute to discussions in your area of expertise. These posts will show up in various places on LinkedIn to others and may provide the critical instance of visibility that you need to get a lead on your job.
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Networking by Pre-networking
Posted by: Jason Matyas in Education, Career Resources, General Business, Business Networking, Social Media, Social Networking on July 22, 2009
As you may know, I love social networking for many reasons. One of the most important reasons is that it opens up new opportunities that rarely or never existed before this technology became mainstream. I routinely read and get a lot of great ideas from Tony Karrer, an eLearning technology expert out of LA. His latest blog post is entitled Pre-network with Linkedin, and it has some great methodology and techniques for getting more out of your time spent networking, especially when it comes to attending networking events. Tony explains:
So, when I go to an event, I want to make sure that I get the most I can from the time. Generally, it's a commitment of 3-4 hours between driving, networking, program. I have to make sure that I get at least as much value from that 3-4 hours as I would from spending the same time using LinkedIn for Networking - and that's tough competition.
Over the years, I've somewhat changed what I'm looking for when I attend a local event. It used to be that I first looked for good content. A program that had interesting speakers and where I expected to learn a lot. Now, unless its someone really great, I don't go because of the program. Most often I can spend 30 minutes on my own to get a better result in terms of content than I get from 60 minutes at an event. And most in-person events do not give you a back-channel or much opportunity for Q&A.
He goes on to explain his technique of reviewing the attendee list and searching for a sample of attendees on Linkedin to see what the makeup of the group will be like. If there are 4-5 people that could be good people to talk to for your networking purposes, then you proceed on to pre-networking. Connecting to 2nd level connections via an introduction on Linkedin is a way to get a personal first impression with the person and build towards a warm (vs cold) in-person introduction and discussion.
Think about it: by the time you meet the person at the event, you have already reviewed their profile, had at least a brief email exchange with them (and perhaps a deeper back-and-forth), and feel like you know the basics about the person by the time you meet face to face. This can make the time spent talking in person much more focused and productive than a cold intro - in part because you otherwise probably waste time talking to people that aren't going to be mutually beneficial for a deeper discussion.
Though I have not taken this exact approach to strategically considering whether I attend an event or not, a related technique I have used is reaching out to people I have met previously at networking events that I'm now connected to on Linkedin and contacting them to see if they're attending and to invite them and pre-network with them before the event. This does two things: 1) even if the person is not attending the event, it is an opportunity to reach out and maintain contact with them, and 2) you can determine an agenda for discussion with that person for when you meet at the event, which leads to a much more focused and productive conversation.
After reading Tony's article, I thought that a combination of these would be quite powerful. You could use Tony's method to determine if the event is worth going to, and if there are a few, but not enough people to make attending worth it, you could invite a few contacts that you know to see if they would like to attend. This again takes advantage of a reason to contact someone, and if you consider the attendee list for the event in light of who else might benefit from meeting the attendees that you find, then you have the even more powerful driver of contacting someone else to offer them help in meeting people that may really benefit them. Like I always say - social networking is interactive and about helping people; creating a win-win by focusing on others first will usually net great returns over time.
Since one of my (many) current activities involves providing career guidance to job seekers, and I always advocate networking as a critical part of a job search, and the heavy use of social networking as a foundation of that, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a great way of leveraging this method for job seekers. While job seekers may have some additional "free" time compared to those that are employed, optimizing one's use of their time is still an important goal to strive for. Attending a networking event every night of the week may not be a very good use of time, but using Tony's methodology to screen and pre-network events is a great way to help preclude attending an event that wastes time (and in many cases, money). Using tools like Meetup, Linkedin Events, Facebook Events, and local networking events, including those posted on Ning networks, since most of these list attendees, you can effectively use this methodology to find and seize opportunities to meet people and potentially find a job that otherwise would fly below your radar.
As more and more events are being published and coordinated online (often in multiple places), Tony's great methodology can be a wonderful time saver and a way to create opportunities to contact people that you otherwise would not have the impetus or reason to. Happy pre-networking!
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