Social Networking

LinkedIn is an excellent tool to market your portfolio of job experience on the Internet. This social media tool allows you to publicly display your profile that acts in many ways as a resume. Additionally you can have a place to put a profile photo of yourself (professional of course), give and receive recommendations, and have a summary of your work experience.

I consider myself a technology junkie. I would be surprised, for example, to find someone who actually uses the Yellow Pages when twice as much information can be had in half the time online It's just so easy... as the user, that is.

I've been with Denver DataMan for exactly one week and am just beginning to find out what it takes to get the right information to the right people at the right time... and to make the user think it's easy. Thank goodness it's Friday because my brain is full!

This evening I taught a session at the Rocky Mountain Micro Finance Institute (RMMFI) about creating a free or almost free presence on the Internet for small businesses. We discussed that there are many options for getting started that can help you put your shingle up on the Internet before you need to spend thousands on professional web presence. We also looked at tools that everyone should be using.

I found some interesting videos from Seth's Blog about social networking and blogging.

Here is a link.

Ever wonder how they make that new tech thing so small? Ever complain that you laptop battery does not make it the whole flight? These are the questions that a business person might ask when they are designing new technology. When Coby Leuscke makes something new he wants to know he can make it smaller, lighter, faster and run with less electricity in the harshest conditions on earth.

Today I clicked on an ad on from Facebook for Sprint and I got to the new Now Widget which is one of the coolest/strangest things I have ever seen. From this talking widget you can see how many sticky notes are being created, top words being used online, Google searches as they happen and news. This disying aray of content is put together to promote the Sprint Now Network. I wonder if Sprint will see sales from this site? This site just goes to show you that there are many things left to try with social media and the Internet.

There is great technology that is getting better every day where you can see others in real time from anywhere in the world but when I hear the idea broached that we might have virtual doctors this just does not sound right. This is a short reminder that social networking is a great tool but only to augment in person communication not eliminate it. What does not scare me is the idea that if doctors have a rare case that they can consult with each other through a network or build connections to share trends and case information. This is how knowledge grows and flows!

Today I was asked if every business uses social networking how will we find any businesses and will there still be any value? This got me thinking….oh no! If every business and nonprofit had a blog, a Facebook page, LinkedIn business profile and so many other others things out there would there be even more junk out on the Internet. Please forgive me in advance for my indecisiveness. Since I don’t have an answer I am going to give a few plausible answers and try to come to a conclusion.

In the past two posts I have written about getting people to pay attention I have written about social networking where sort blasts of information are the way you get people’s attention. We will go back to that next week with Twitter but for this week I am writing about Blogs where we share several paragraphs of content and sometimes more with our readers. Blog stand for Web Log and it is good to think of it as a place to log activity and share thoughts.