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Social networking: Who are the professional Arctic Monkeys and where are they playing?

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25th Jul 2008
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Reach out across the netIn recent weeks AccountingWEB members have debated the merits of social networking for finance professionals. John Stokdyk sifts through the discussion to find out about the possibilities and pitfalls from accountants who have been networking online.

Pop acts such as Lilly Allen, Sandi Thom and the Arctic Monkeys have built significant followings on websites such as MySpace and Facebook, but are there equivalent options for accountants and other business professionals?

That was the gist of an Any Answers query posted by James Pearce in late April. Aside from AccountingWEB, he asked, "Are there any social networking type sites, but for professionals?"

According to research by Comscore, 78% of UK internet users get involved with online networks. The average visitor spends 5.8 hours a month on at least one site, and 20% of networkers spend at least 22 hours doing so.

Online social networks have also attracted the interest of technology analyst Gartner, which surveyed the networking habits of 4,000 business people towards the end of last year. According to Gartner, social media remain largely untapped by business, but will become an important tool for managing large enterprises in the future.

Based on the observations and responses of AccountingWEB members, this article presents a review of currently available networking sites and facilities, and the professional uses to which they are being applied.

Networking dos and don'ts
DO:
  • Accept social media is here to stay
  • Listen and learn from other participants in the network
  • Observe netiquette - stop and think about what has been written before posting an impulsive response, particularly if you're angry
  • Engage in meaningful conversations. Talk about the things you know about to reinforce your credibility
  • Think about what you're trying to achieve through your involvement with online communities. Unless there's a point to your activity, you could end up wasting hundreds of hours of your working life on purposeless banter
  • Include links to your sites/profiles and blogs when you post on other sites
  • Monitor activity so you know when you or your firm is mentioned and respond if necessary. Google Alerts is a good way to keep track.

DON'T:

  • Push your services or products at every opportunity. Most people don't respond well to in-your-face selling and that's particularly true on social networks
  • Post compromising information or photos
  • Surf social networks when you're tired late at night or have had a drink or two. You may regret it in the morning.

Online networking capabilities and concepts

At their core, social media tools give their users a bunch of different communications mechanisms including chatrooms and forums, blogs, instant status updates, shared document stores, networking affinity groups and email bulletins. Any and all of these can be applied in a business context to communicate with prospects or pass on knowledge to those with the same professional interests.

A typical online network will give you a profile page to describe yourself and your interests, plus space to store your blog jottings, images, music and/or videos. In many cases you will be able to collect friends or contacts from other members of the community and interact with them through comments on their pages or special interest forums.

Ian Hendry, who launched a business-focused online community called WeCanDo.biz in May, highlighted some of the elements he felt a business network should provide:

  • Social networking capabilities that would let you build a network of trusted contacts from existing customers, suppliers, colleagues and contacts.
  • Information about the businesses involved in the network. On WeCanDo.biz, for example, Hendry is extending the concept to let these trusted contacts endorse the businesses they use.
  • The ability to broadcast business needs, so that suitable, qualified businesses will be able to offer you their services.

What's the point of online networking?

You might as well ask what's the point of networking or any other kind of marketing/business development activity. The online world is just another way to meet and communicate with other people - and perhaps market your services to them.

After visiting headline-grabbing sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, many professionals might view them as a colossal waste of time - unless you have an interest in raising your profile among sub-25 age groups. But as our social networking pop stars have proved, the PR power of online sites eclipses all other media.

"Social networks carry the trust and endorsement of tight groups of people and as such can play a key role in micro marketing [and] viral marketing," commented sustainable transport consultant Ash Gupta. He used Facebook to make contact with influential media editors and says this has taken his relationships with them to a new level. "We know each other in the round. That is the key," he said.

General knowledge and relevant advice Online reputations are built on usefulness and trust, so the best way to build kudos is to share your expertise with as wide an audience as possible. As the Any Answers thread that kick-started this article demonstrates, online networks are a great way to pick the brains of people who have dealt with the issues you are facing or know the answers to the questions you want to ask. Another good example is our sister site UK Business Forums, which has more than 27,000 active members who swap entrepreneurial advice, tips and new business leads. LinkedIn, one of the leading networks for professionals, has a very handy Q&A section where you can ask the wider membership anything you like.

Marketing General knowledge about business trends and wider social and economic issues can very quickly translate into market research to develop new opportunities or refine your current propositions. Special interest groups on the various networks make it possible for you to tap very quickly into niche markets and identify potential partners and prospects. LinkedIn enthusiast Andy Headworth says it has become second nature for him to check out every potential business contact on LinkedIn before he meets them in person. The sheer marketing power of these sites has become a minor drawback for the serious professional user, as numerous business opportunity offers and sales pitches can sometimes make it difficult to get to the useful contacts and material you want.

Recruitment Targeted research on individuals operating within your marketplace has another very valuable use: employee search and selection. For the past year, social networking has thrown the HR world into turmoil. Technophobes see the phenomenon as a way for staff members to advertise themselves to your competitors, while more enlightened practitioners have latched on to Facebook, LinkedIn as free-access talent pools for new recruits.

Siding with the scaremongers, WeCanDo.biz's Ian Hendry sees this as the real motive behind LinkedIn. The main point behind LinkedIn is "still mainly about catching up with old chums and presenting your CV so you are more easily located for hiring purposes", he argues. "The fact that the chargeable upgrades to membership are aimed at recruiters tells me this is a site where membership still puts personal benefits ahead of business ones."

Business network directory

BT Tradespace BT's play for a share of the social media market looks to have all the right ingredients: blogs, networking tools, user forums and interest groups, but has failed to ignite.

Bview A business search directory that lets people review the listed businesses. Listed companies can improve their search ranking by getting customer reviews.

Ecademy Long-established, UK-based business networking site with good functionality for blogging, circulating news and building up affinity groups and online marketplaces.

LinkedIn Lets you advertise your expertise and qualifications and is good for tracking down decision-makers, experts and potential recruits. Very good Q&A facility.

Naymz Relatively new site based on building up trust-based networks. When you reach trust level 9, you get access to improved search and Google submissions.

Ning Lets you set up your own networks to interact online on almost any topic. Facilities for blogging, photo-sharing and interaction.

Xing Formerly known as OpenBC, Xing is an international business networking site based in Germany. Good search and recommendation facilities to match people and opportunities to your profile information.

UK Business Forums Thriving online site for entrepreneurs that includes Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and messaging, which online networkers now expect.

WeCanDo.biz Hybrid between a directory site and a social network where members can promote and recommend businesses to their contacts.

Useful consumer sites
Facebook
Flickr
MySpace
Plaxo Pulse
Spock
Twitter
WAYN
YouTube

A word of caution

In a round-up of the Facebook face-off last year, HR consultant Mike Morrison alerted readers to the idea of an organisation's or individual's "NetRep". Material put into the public domain on these sites can come back and haunt you, for example by giving a prospective employer a reason not to employ you. Web 2.0 enthusiast Dennis Howlett addresses this concern with the simple advice: "Common sense would dictate that you really shouldn't put into the virtual world something you would not do/say in real life."

Online networking raises some important personal privacy and data security issues. Almost all of the sites have email response mechanisms - but then seek to contain the communication within their internal messaging systems. This causes two things to happen: first, your email volume goes up, and many of the messages you send are stored outside of your own email system. On an individual level, this can be an irritant, but overlooking an instruction or request for services delivered via an external networking site could cause even more trouble.

Many networking sites also invite you to search for and import contacts from address books stored on sites such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, or Microsoft Outlook on your own computer. To do so requires entering your email username and password to the social networking site. Can you spot the problem? This process might help you grow your friend network, but it is also doing the same for the network provider and gives them access to personal data that you control, which would go against one of the principles of the UK's Data Protection Act.

And finally, gripes about the reliability of consumer sites such MySpace, Twitter and Facebook also plague some of the networks catering for business users. Expect to experience blips in service - for example the profile and messaging mechanisms in LinkedIn are a law unto themselves.

Do you get out what you put in?

Ian Hendry built a business case for WeCanDo.biz around the shortcomings of existing sites for professional purposes. Comparing the amount of time people put into the activity and what they get out of it is alarming, he says, "My problem with LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy et al is that it seems you need to tolerate months of courteous nodding while suffering blatant self promotion until it becomes 'polite' to start discussing whether there is grounds to do business...

"I believe we have too low an expectation of what such sites should be doing for us and they are lazy in terms of what they deliver. With such great contacts on them it should have the buzz and results of a speed dating event! As it stands, most of [them] feel closer to cribbage conventions."

Mark Lee is another who has invested a lot of time in online networking, building accountants' groups on Facebook and Ecademy. Business people who find don't find these sites don't work for them are usually those who are most avidly trying to sell their service or products within the network, he says.

"I don't think anyone joins a network to be on the receiving end of constant sales messages. The corollary to this is that they should not therefore expect to make sales by pushing their own sales messages. If they want to advertise then they should do that and/or add their listing to a directory type site."

There are no fast bucks to be made. But if you are prepared to play a long game and apply the same principles you use offline, social networking can bring results, he argues. AccountingWEB's tax editor Nichola Ross Martin, for example, confirms that she gets more referrals for work from writing and commenting on professional websites than she does from any other form of publicity.

Former AccountingWEB.com managing editor Jay Hammond has been an active networker since going freelance last year. "What I have found is that my name recognition has increased and that I am better received when I contact others," she reports. "I have found that I am being solicited for input more and more often as my network grows." Hammond has not been able to track a direct link between her networking activities and her bottom line, but concludes: "Done in moderation it can’t really hurt."

Network-savvy professionals such as these are demonstrating the mechanics of what social media consultant Jay Deragon calls The Relationship Economy, where your personal rankings will be based on the value you add and the frequency in which you deliver value to your networks.

While Deragon has an entire blog site build around it, the underlying mantra of online networking expressed by Andy Headworth is a simple one: "You only get out of it what you put in."

As long as you're not a practitioner burdened by the looming 31 October Self Assessment deadline for paper returns, perhaps the quiet afternoons of August are a good time to experiment with the online networking. On the right is a short directory of social websites that might be worth investigating.

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By AnonymousUser
30th Jul 2008 14:13

Well written

A thoroughly researched and very well written article.

We broke our 1,000th member point today and we are getting some great feedback from our users on the business our site is nettting them. And that's the point -- online business networking isn't just about virtual handshakes and your net reputation, it's about doing real business. That should be any participant's goal, with the other stuff seen as useful contributors to that goal. Just like offline business in fact.

Readers can feel very welcome to come and connect with me through our site and I will help them however I am able. You can view and connect through my profile at http://www.wecando.biz/profile.php?bid=20 .

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

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