Creating a Borderless World through Social Networking

Over the years, Internet is continuously evolving and inciting endless creative ideas that leverage novel online marketing strategies such as social networking sites to achieve a greater share of on line business networking.

The rise of social networking sites has created a borderless world by reaching out to people around the globe regardless of race or nationality, profession, affiliation, education, and aspirations.

The concept of “bringing the gap of technology, business and friendship…” is ConBuzz’s

(http://www.conbuzz.com) primary objective of connecting to the world, leading professionals who desire for career advancements to a higher level of endless opportunities as well as achieving job satisfaction and stability their hearts so desire.

ConBuzz, established in November 2006, holds its corporate office in Florida, U.S.A. The company prides itself with its innovative and comprehensive business and acquaintance needs. It keeps its millions of members from around the seven continents updated on daily news, current events, and business events all over the globe. Its global network assists all its members to work its way to grab unlimited possibilities of being connected to the whole world through its state of the art technology.

ConBuzz offers a variety of services covering the field of law, finance, management, marketing, IT and Internet, architecture and construction, arts, creative, media, and employment.

Its legal services team is composed of top-notch lawyers who are adept in business and corporate law, intellectual property/patents, labor and employment law, mediation and arbitration and real estate law.

Its financial group is a team whose expertise evolves around accounting, financial planning, insurance and real estate, while its management team excels toward business processes/operations, change management, organizational development, outsourcing, and strategy consulting.

If you are looking for comprehensive marketing advice, ConBuzz has a group of professionals who are experts in the field of advertising, branding, direct marketing, events and tradeshows, market research, public relations and communications, search and online marketing.

In keeping abreast with global demands and competitions has a team of IT and Internet experts who are well trained in interface design and usability, networking and security, technical support, translation and localization, web design and development, and technical writing.

ConBuzz likewise gives assistance to employment related matters like recruitment and placement,

executive search, technical recruitment, career coaching and resumes, and executive coaching.

In the field of art and media, ConBuzz employs its cutting edge technology in audio, video, multi media production, graphic design, photography, printing, writing, and editing.

ConBuzz is designed to heighten social networking for business networking to its maximum level and create virtual communities of people into global proportions with the ultimate objective of utilizing technology in reaching out to the whole world.

Networking and the Trust Factor

Effective and successful networkers have several traits in common. They are respected among their colleagues, they are professional, they follow up and they can be trusted. Trust is considered a fragile thing in the world of business. It is hard to build and easy to tear down. Trust can be achieved instantly or can take a long time to acquire. But once trust is secure, networkers and professionals should try their hardest to maintain and develop it for business and social success.

List below are tips that networkers, professionals and students can use to build their trust with new business counterparts and old friends.

The Name Game

A great way to gain someone’s trust and attention is to remember their name. Names come a dime a dozen but people really pay attention and acknowledge their counterparts who respect them and remember their name. Professionals may have tons of excuses why they have a hard time remembering names. Learn to say the person’s name as often as possible during the initial networking conversation. Ask for a business card so that you can link their name with their face. Also follow up in a timely manner and send out an email or phone call. These are great ways that networkers can remember their business counterpart’s name.

Actions Speak Louder

One of the most embarrassing events could be to link up with a professional, make a promise and not follow through. It is also the quickest way to lose your credibility and trust with that particular person. It is true that actions speak louder than words. Be an individual of your word. Follow through with even the smallest commitment. Keep yourself and others accountable. These are also great ways of showing professionalism.

Be Prepared

While attending networking events and business functions, always come prepared. Arrive on time and have enough business cards. Make sure that you RSVP ahead of time as a form of etiquette. Have a proper handshake and a great 30 second speech for introducing yourself. Ask great networking questions and listen carefully as others speak. Take a genuine interest in your business counterparts and follow up to develop good relationships. These keys will gain you an outstanding amount of trust.

LinkedIn – The Power Of Networking

With the introduction of social media in the last five or so years, networking and expanding your relevancy in your community has never been more productive. Unlike most advertising and media, social media enables you to create a two-way communication with your network contacts and potential customers. Therefore, the more email addresses, connections, fans, etc. that you can capture in your database, the easier it will be to communicate within your community.

Social media doesn’t just give you information, but rather, interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for comments, letting you vote on an article, or communicating an RSVP for an upcoming event. In the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, these social media sites can become big “catcher’s mitts”, enabling you to use these portals as repositories of information.

Proactively embracing social media is both an efficient and effective way to expand your overall brand awareness in your trade area and communities. One social media portal is that can be an excellent source for business networking within your community is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is an Internet-based business-contact network that enables you to connect to key businesspeople in your trade area. LinkedIn allows you to identify key local contacts in your trade, geography, civic organizations and corporations — then gives you the ability to “connect” with them by sending a LinkedIn connection invitation. You also can join industry-related groups on LinkedIn and post comments on industry topics. LinkedIn is available for a fee but most, if not all the functionality can be accessed for free.

One of the strongest social media sites for networking professionals, LinkedIn has over 100 million members and growing rapidly focused mainly on business-to-business networking in contrast to Facebook, which is more social in nature. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted business contacts (and their networks) and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals — many of which are with people that are 2 and 3 degrees removed from you.

The premise of LinkedIn is that the larger your network of contacts, the better positioned you are in order to garner referrals – either directly or indirectly. Referrals from LinkedIn are commonplace and since this social media portal is built from professionals that actively seek to network, new connections are generally open to expanding their contacts.

Here is the how the site works and how you can maximize its effectiveness:

Profile: Each person on LinkedIn creates a personal profile that can be made visible to all 100 million users. The profile is basically an online “resume” of your current and previous work so that others can see your background. In order to maximize your exposure, filling out your profile in detail is critical and should include:

  • Complete background
  • List key words
  • Recommendations from others
  • Relevant industry groups

After you create your profile, you can start to add people to your “network” as connections. These direct connections (1st degree) are key colleagues that you know personally. You connect to these colleagues by sending them an invitation to “join your network”. Once you are connected to a direct contact, you become connected to their contacts as well. These contacts are not directly accessible to you, but rather viewed as 2nd and 3rd degree contacts that can be reached through your 1st degree contact.

Home Page: LinkedIn is designed with a cumulative landing page, or home page, that enables you to get a snapshot of all the activity related to your full network on one page. Think of this as command central for your network. Once you have an established network, this is an excellent place to come to every day to review opportunities in a concise fashion. Unlike other social media portals that require more time maintenance, simply spending 5-10 minutes a day here will keep you at the epicenter of activity for your network. Included on your home page are a number of key hotspots:

  • Connections: You can review all of the status updates of connections in your network as well as seeing new people that join LinkedIn that may be of interest to you to invite to your network.
  • Status Updates: This is a nice area that enables you to stay on top of the activities of your connections. See a new job title for a colleague – and send them a quick congrats message; read about a new connection in your network – reach out to them with a comment. The more you are active with your connections, the more that will put you in high esteem as an epicenter networker.
  • Recommendations: As you write or receive recommendations, they are posted on your profile and home page for all to see. What better way to establish credibility in your network then to have a third-party endorse your work. In addition, as you assemble recommendations on your profile, these can later be used as testimonials in relevant marketing campaigns for your use.
  • Group Status: When you begin to join groups (highly recommended as you will see below) you can monitor all the activities of your groups on your home page. This is advantageous to see as there are a number of discussions, new members, postings, etc. that can flag you to opportunities. Groups offer you the best way to really capitalize on growing your network with people that have relevant backgrounds and geographies.
  • People You May Know: This section appears daily and is an excellent area to expand your network with the ability to directly send a short introduction as well as an invite to connect. All of the people that appear here are already in your network, just not 1st degree connections.
  • Profile Views: Profile updates, photos, status, discussions, group activities and recent connections are all shown on your home page to keep you informed of changes with your connections. It is quite amazing what you can see transform here and in some cases, it can give you “insider” information on people and companies. For instance, changes in a connection’s overall profile may signal an imminent job change or changes to multiple profiles at the same company, can indicate unrest at that company.
  • Q & A: This section is an excellent way to showcase your expertise in a myriad of topics. The Q & A section can be customized to your background and as you answer questions, the questioner can assign the “best answer” classification to your answer. When this happens, you begin to position yourself as an expert in your field and this will foster more people to flock to you. Ultimately, every aspect of your activities on LinkedIn can cast you in the epicenter of activity coming and going.

Connections: Establishing your initial network is easy with LinkedIn. Starting at your home page, select “add connections” from the tab at the top of the page. From there you can go a few ways: a) send invites to people you already have email addresses; or b) have LinkedIn find them for you. If you are using any of the following email accounts – Hotmail.com, Gmail.com, yahoo.com, AOL.com, Outlook or Apple mail – you can automatically have LinkedIn search your databases to find out which of your contacts may already be on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will identify all those email addresses that are in your contact lists; people that you have received emails from; as well as people you have sent emails to. After a few minutes, you will be presented with a long list of potential connections that will be flagged if they are currently a member or LinkedIn or not. In either case, you may invite them to connect.

In addition, LinkedIn will allow you to look for former work colleagues from previous companies where you were in employed. These colleagues can be sent an invite, even if you do not have their current email address. Select “colleagues” from the same “add connections” page and click on your former companies to find potentially connections from the past.

Building up your contact list is critical, because the more 1st degree connections you have will lead to having more 2nd and 3rd degree connections. That is the start of building a larger overall network through your direct contact base. But, you shouldn’t stop there. Groups are an excellent way to expand your network to the real value of LinkedIn – connecting to people that you don’t know but SHOULD know.

Groups: Groups are the mother lodes of connection-building on LinkedIn. Unlike other ways to connect in which you need the person’s email address, groups can open up the door to creating connections directly through messaging. The first step to maximizing your reach through groups is to search for relevant groups that make sense for you to join. You can conduct your search on the “groups” tab and type in keywords in order to find groups. Once you find a number of groups, send a request to the group organizer and they should approve you within 24 hours.

Once approved to join the group, you will have the ability to view discussions, news, jobs and most importantly, the members. In addition, you will have the ability to sort by geography – i.e. 25 miles surrounding a zip code, for instance. Building your network within the group is simple to achieve. Within the group (and with the free version of LinkedIn), you can see the top 500 members based on the number of connections they have. Although there is a feature that members can use that turns off the ability to send them a direct message, very few users on LinkedIn prohibit direct messaging. Direct messaging is critical because it gives you the opportunity to introduce yourself to people that don’t know you or you do not have their email address.

When sending a direct message, you will find greater success in “soft-selling” your introduction as a way of letting know “you are out there”. Don’t be discouraged if you do not get an immediate answer – in some cases it may take weeks, even months, but doing this only takes 10-15 seconds and you start to establish your network faster.

Companies: Another way to expand your network is to search for contacts through the company search function. There are a few ways that you can tap this database – by company category; size of company by number of employees; and by geography. If your business and its success is contingent on the close proximity of your customers, searching by geography would be the most advantageous way to search new connections.

To search by geography, click on the “location” pull-down menu on the companies tab and put the zip code of your business. LinkedIn will search all of the connections you have in your network (1st, 2nd and 3rd degrees) that are located near that zip code and list the companies for those connections. You will then be able to click on the companies and see what other contacts may be advantageous for you to connect with.

People: To add more connections, visit the “contacts” tab from your homepage. You can then click on “network statistics” and scroll down to the center of the page and click on “Your Region”. Clicking on your selected region will identify all of the contacts in your network – from 1st to 2nd to 3rd degrees. Your focus here would be to convert as many of your 2nd and 3rd degree connections into direct connections to begin to establish a closer, direct relationship with them.

By using LinkedIn, you can create a broader network of working professionals to foster relationships with and begin to build up an impenetrable circle of contacts that are exclusively yours. Targeting prospective connections via groups and companies, in addition to your already established network, will begin to develop a referral system that creates both short and long-term bonds. This network can become a very profitable way to grow your business.

Business And Social Networking

Business And Social Networking Sites – How They Can Be Helpful

You will come across a large number of social networking websites nowadays on the web, such as Facebook or Twitter, and almost all of them are over-subscribed, with hundreds of thousands of people continuing to join them every day. People with different backgrounds, varying interests and unusual goals in life head to social networking portals so that they can find people with similar interests or preferences, or to simply communicate with friends. What’s amazing is that most of these web portals have millions of active users at any given point of time during the day and that number is actually increasing every hour. Along with that, the amount of posts and written pieces available over the Internet are increasing too. With rapid advancements in the field of information technology, this number will keep on increasing, along with large number of internet-based businesses that thrive on them.

Propagating Your Business Via Social Networking Sites

With social sites being pretty huge now, they are exceptional internet tools where people can meet and interact with buyers and sellers alike. Today, individuals, or rather consumers prefer seeing businesses on social networking platforms or social media websites as opposed to corporate websites. If you’re considering starting a business of your own but you don’t really use sites such as Twitter or Facebook, you won’t really be able to achieve your full potential. If you aren’t a member of any of the leading Internet directories, that’s an added negative mark… In today’s internet-based business world, having a good online presence is key to your success! On tight budget? Don’t worry, such tools are an extremely cost-effective approach to marketing and promotion, certainly more cost-effective than offline marketing.

Leading Portals

If you are already running a business, you might have already done a lot of homework while selecting the most appropriate social networking medium for your business. Some of them, such as Facebook or Twitter, are very helpful for your marketing campaigns, public relations as well as useful in generating profits. These networks can help you in reaching your business goals a lot sooner, you just have to choose the portal that will work best for you. Most the time, businesses enter the social networking world so that they can improve their brand awareness, create a buzzabout their products or services, and also to enhance B2C, C2B and B2B communications. Their core objective is creating a presence and using such websites and tools as a podium to cater to existing customers and to find new ones. In short, these types of sites are a vital tool for expanding your brand name on the world-wide web.

Which One To Opt For

While you are choosing one of these sites for your business, you need to consider where your target market and audience spends most of their time. It could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even your own company blog. Generally the larger social networking sites are the way to go.

How to Use Social Networking in Your Marketing Strategy

Any business today will understand how crucial it is to have an online presence for the future success of the business. With the right use of the Internet marketing tools available, you can allow your business to flourish in even the most competitive market. Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. As more businesses are gaining an understanding of the efficacy of Internet marketing tools, social media is becoming a more popular option. With most potential customers spending at least part of each day online, marketing on the Internet is the easiest way of reaching customers across the nation and around the globe.

What is Social Network Marketing?

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn are the most popular social media networks for both online and offline businesses. The proper use of these sites will help you reach more customers. The biggest advantage of sites like these is that they offer free sign-up, which makes them among the most cost-effective advertising tools available. Through your social media site, you can advertise sales, invite customers to special events, and connect to a whole new group of customers without spending money to market directly to them. Other Social Networking Tools Within social media sites you will gain access to many other tools that will enhance your online presence and allow you to connect with more customers.

• News aggregators are social networking tools. These news feeds allow you to stay on top of the latest news in your business, based on the topics you select. Sites like Digg give you access to news aggregation services that will give you the information you need. Placing a Digg icon on your blog or in articles will also give you the chance to appear in the Digg news feed, further expanding your market.

• Tracking tools will also come in handy when planning your social networking strategy. With Internet tracking tools, you can stay on top of how many times people click links within your site, so you’ll know which strategies are working. They will also give you access to information about how many times people share links on social networking sites.

• All-in-One tools allow you to maintain many different social networking accounts with ease. With the right tools, you can access multiple social media accounts at once so you can communicate with more customers. With creative use of the right social networking tools, you can find your way to the success you want for your business.

Networking Through Online Business Directories

If we observe and study the most successful businesses and professionals, there are some factors which are common in them. One of the most striking among them is their ability to create successful business networks. Networking is vital for any business or professional to really succeed, whether it is online or offline.

Internet has become a new arena for people to get connected. Initially, it was just for fun or for other personal reasons. Now it has emerged to be a very powerful business tool. More and more innovations are coming up to increase the level of interaction between people around the world. It has now opened doors for global trading and communication. Online business directories and online local yellow pages is a major business networking tool.

Majority of them allow free business listing. For some, you need to pay a small monthly or yearly payment. When you consider the ROI, this investment will never be a waste. Most of these business directories allow geo-targeted listing. Online local business listings will greatly help local businesses and professionals to get targeted local traffic and prospects.

Some of these online business listings like the one offered by Google, let you post product and service details, pictures and other business related information. There is ample facility for customer and prospect interaction. Your customers can rate your product or service, post reviews and ask questions. You can also respond to their queries through the business directory interface. This networking will further enhance your future sales and build a trust factor among the visitors.

Networking through online business directories should be done as a disciplined, targeted and planned activity. This interaction actually portrays your business image and ethics. In the long run, it should not become a black spot for your business or career. People love businesses that really care for their clients and prospects. Getting emotionally connected with your clientele is a sure way to get repeat sales. And the positive feeling also triggers many ‘word of mouth’ reviews and appraisals.

Even local businesses who are just starting to use online media to promote their products or services can significantly increase their lead generation through these online business listings. These are also good for developing a brand image for your business. All major search engines gives importance to this brand feel while displaying their search results.

Great success has been achieved by many online and offline entrepreneurs using online business directories. Start building interactive business profile pages on all major online business directories and drive highly motivated, ready to buy web traffic to your business.

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