Lessons I've learned from online networking sites
It occurs to me today that I've learned some important life lessons from online networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and Twitter. Sound implausible? I guess it is a bit. But if you know me at all, you know that my life is full of implausibilities. Kind of like the Infinite Improbability Drive postulated by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide series.
More to the point, the sea of imbecilities that usually constitutes online networking means that I shied away from it for years. After experiencing the power of social networking sites, I'm convinced that the imbecility is a small price to pay for having much more information and the feeling of connectedness regular updates can generate. Ultimately, these sites are good for business, good for staying on top of your world, and generating opportunity. Also, they're fun. What's not to love?
The lessons I've learned can be boiled down to a couple of salient points:
1. A small amount of easy action will eventually go a long way. Building up your network requires very little effort, and a small addition of a friend or two a day will eventually lead to amassing a huge network of people who (hopefully) like you. An addition of a paragraph here or a paragraph there will eventually lead to an online profile as weighty as a tome.
2. Precious little effort is required if you know the right people. My host sister in Turkey invited me to join Facebook a long time ago, it was summer of 2007 I think. I hated the interface (and still hate it) so I used that site only seldom. But after about a year of ignoring my account there, I had something like 90 friends. This happened with virtually no effort on my part, except what it took to hit the "accept friend" button once every few months.
It seems to me that these principles can be applied to business or really any area of one's life. In business, small daily marketing tasks, so I've read, lead to large results. Why? The effects are cumulative. You put yourself out there and meet a bunch of folks, and they refer business, and eventually, voila! Which segues into the second thing I've learned - "it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know." People are more likely to find you or what you offer if you are connected to folks who know folks. It's about cultivating a network, because eventually you're going to strike gold. Perhaps it sounds asininely simple, but it's the honest truth.
And that's all I've got for now. Cheers!
More to the point, the sea of imbecilities that usually constitutes online networking means that I shied away from it for years. After experiencing the power of social networking sites, I'm convinced that the imbecility is a small price to pay for having much more information and the feeling of connectedness regular updates can generate. Ultimately, these sites are good for business, good for staying on top of your world, and generating opportunity. Also, they're fun. What's not to love?
The lessons I've learned can be boiled down to a couple of salient points:
1. A small amount of easy action will eventually go a long way. Building up your network requires very little effort, and a small addition of a friend or two a day will eventually lead to amassing a huge network of people who (hopefully) like you. An addition of a paragraph here or a paragraph there will eventually lead to an online profile as weighty as a tome.
2. Precious little effort is required if you know the right people. My host sister in Turkey invited me to join Facebook a long time ago, it was summer of 2007 I think. I hated the interface (and still hate it) so I used that site only seldom. But after about a year of ignoring my account there, I had something like 90 friends. This happened with virtually no effort on my part, except what it took to hit the "accept friend" button once every few months.
It seems to me that these principles can be applied to business or really any area of one's life. In business, small daily marketing tasks, so I've read, lead to large results. Why? The effects are cumulative. You put yourself out there and meet a bunch of folks, and they refer business, and eventually, voila! Which segues into the second thing I've learned - "it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know." People are more likely to find you or what you offer if you are connected to folks who know folks. It's about cultivating a network, because eventually you're going to strike gold. Perhaps it sounds asininely simple, but it's the honest truth.
And that's all I've got for now. Cheers!