Reach out and touch someone – in cyberspace!
There’s nothing like face to face networking. Looking someone in the eye and getting to know them, finding out what makes them tick and where you might fit in to each others world, but as useful as it is, it’s not always possible, or practical.
If you are geographically challenged and need to find contacts on far distant shores, or perhaps time challenged and can’t make it to networking events or perhaps network phobic and don’t want to make it to network events, then there still may be hope for you – reach out and touch someone – in cyberspace.
On-line business networking may be your salvation. It can generate sales, market your services, assist you to recruit or job-hunt, help you exchange knowledge, develop strategic alliances, build joint ventures, or allow you to catch up with trends, research and issues in other countries or even around the corner.
Sites like Linked-in.com, with 9 million members and Ryze.com with 450,000 members in 200 countries, are two of the many business networking websites that offer the business person an on-line oasis in which to network and schmooze.
Joining is easy. Fill out the form with your on line contact details, expertise and desires and then wait for the on line genie to send you a list of names and profiles of other like minded members. From there it’s up to you to make contact and fan the flames of business desire.
You can also use these sites to manage and extend your flesh and blood networks by inviting your existing networking colleagues to join your on-line networking group and for them to then encourage their colleagues to join the same on-line networking group.
You will be amazed at how quickly this on-line network will grow and how useful it will soon become to you, as the “six degrees of separation” rule kicks in and you unearth synergy, contacts and opportunities buried in your on-line community that you never thought were possible.
There’s nothing like face to face networking. Looking someone in the eye and getting to know them, finding out what makes them tick and where you might fit in to each others world, but as useful as it is, it’s not always possible, or practical. If you are geographically challenge.
When signals like Reach out and touch someone in cyberspace! emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Reach out and touch someone in cyberspace! will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
