In last days I’m receiving a lot of connection requests within Facebook and LinkedIN. 100% of these are unqulified ones: from people I’ve never met before or I’ve never interact with and without any introduction. Because the easiness to click “Send connection request” and “Add as a Friend” button, It makes people lazy in giving you any kind of introduction about themself. This is a common and unfair behaviour on online networking. Doesn’t matter if you are trying to contact an Open Networker or Not. Even if your target contact is an open networker, it doesn’t mean that you can avoid to introduce yourself. Because your target contact is an open networker, she/he receives hundreds of contact requests and you probably will be just one of them, just a new stamp in her/his contact list, a new email address to “spam” to. After 5 minutes you’ve been added, probably she/he will have forgotten your name and your face. Ok, you have a connection more and probably you can access to her/his friends/contacts list and so what? Which is the goal you are reaching? Networking online is just the same as networking face-to-face. Would you ever approach to a person during an event without introducing yourself and asking her/him for their business card and address list? I suppose you wouldn’t. If you act like that, in the best scenario the person probably will give you her/his business card but she/he will forget you one second later. In the worst case she/he will completely ignore you even if he is an open networker. The politeness isn’t an option. Here is some advatages you can gain introducing yourself: You’ll be noticeable. Being a contact used to receive unqualified connection request, just because you’ve introduced yourself, you will be noticed by her/him. When you’ll send a new message, she/he will recognize you. You’ll be intersting. If in your introduction you’ll give a reason-why and you’ll show that you payed attention to the contact’s profile, you’ll drive your target contact to “study” your profile too. You’ll establish a relationship. Seeing a personalized message, a target contact will be impelled to write you back. You’ll get her/his attention and you shall establish a contact since the beginning. Paying attention to a small detail, such as writing 2 lines in your contact request, you are already helping your business. Is it a so big effort, comparing to the benefits?
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What is Business Networking and how can it help you in your business? A collection of articles about business networking.
It was November 2004 when I joined Linkedin and I started approaching online business networking, finding out year by year the great opportunities belonging to this activity. Since then, I experimented and observed numerous ways to build and manage professional relationships using social web capabilities. Ten years later, my friend Gianluigi Cogo ( a real innovator in social related processes) and I publish “Business Networking, How to use social web for building professional relationships” (title translated) targeted to italian market. As written in the introduction, the book doesn’t claim to be a complete work (it is quite impossible, due to the on going social web evolution) but it offers a framework for understanding how to organize a profitable on line business networking. For this reason, the book starts from an introduction of business networking theory, going through tools and methodologies for both personal and corporate implementation, giving a sample of cases from “real world” and analyzing the impact of each action. More, we decide to complete our work with a “virtual” round table. The last part of the book cointains an interview to main protagonists of social media scene in Italy and Europe. You’ll find how Mauro Lupi, Barbara Bonaventura, Mafe De Baggis,Vincenzo Cosenza, Gianluca Diegoli, Marco Massarotto, Alberto D’Ottavi, Robin Good, Giorgio Soffiato and others are approaching at online business networking. Actually book is in Italian only, but if you’re a plublisher and you’re interested in translating it, please contact us. In the meanwhile, if you are interested in online Business Networking, you can follow us on Professional Networking on Scoop.it where we collect the best practice for turning online contacts in amassadors and increasing revenues.
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It seems that the new algorithm is penilizing post from Pages, favouring updates from friends instead. According empiric observation from Original Marins Page Manager, the organic reach of pages has been decrased by a 40%. This means that the Organic Visibility of page contents is going to be negatively affected by this new algorithm. Comparing with the previous EdgeRank, the new Facebook system has three improvement: Story Bumping. The content recency will be less important in selecting what to show on newsfeed. According to Facebook this will let to see about 70% of published story against the before 57%. Last actor.Will evaluate the last 50 more recent interaction in order to prioritize contents coming from actors which we interact with in the near past time. Chronological Ordering will order in chronological order the updates written by our closest friends. These improvements favour organic contents coming from personal profile more than the ones published through Pages, that will be pushed to advertise their content in order to appear in the timeline. While many social media marketers are blaming Facebook for forcing them to enter a cicle of advertisment (promoting page -> promoting contents), observing the way the new algorithm works, we can find out some guideline to rethink the Facebook Action Plan. 1. Interaction will be the key The last actor feature prioritizes in timeline posts from users we interact more with. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if the post is recent or not. The more a content is “actioned” by closest friends, the more It will be highlighted on timeline. Beacuse the Cronological order has a low impact in ranking, if a user share a content and this content gains comments, like or other sharings, in theory it should never expire. 2. Facebook Panda The second attention-point is related to the source. According to the interview to Lars Backtrom – News Feed Manager at Facebook – by AllThingd (“Like This if You Like Pandas! Facebook Says Publishers Shouldn’t Fret About News Feed Changes.“), It seems that Facebook will mix a lot of variables in the news feed selection. Among them the prestige of the source: according to Backtron, given a certain content, if it comes from a trusted source will be better ranked than the same content coming from a non-trusted one. This means that importing feeds from news aggregators, for example, will be less valuable than an original and direct linked content. Another cut will be made on memes and “strategies employed by people who get distribution on Facebook“, like photos with call-to-action builded in order to get actioned by users and distribuited. Read also: News Feed FYI: Showing More High Quality Content (Facebook.com) 3. Conent quality and real engagement So what…
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Even if many blogger and networking experts continuosly suggest to avoid to send generic connection requests, this behavior is still common. So, if we don’t want push away the 80% of connection requests we receive, a verification process is needed. Since I’ve joined LinkedIN, I’ve tested different methods and now I probably found the one that suits to me and, I hope, to you too.
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Proving competences and skills is the key to get visible and to get find out by potential prospects and recruiters. The new LinkedIN profile added important features to enrich profiles with contents such as images, video, audio, presentations and documents. The greatest opportunity is to create a documented “file” and a track of records of activities. Contents can be added within “Summary” section and each experience. There are no official rules in deciding where to upload them but, as general suggestion, we can say that in the summary you can upload contents related to the career, such as certifications, video presentation, show cases, ecc; in experience you should upload specific project related to your job. How to add contents STEP 1: Enter the Editing mode of profile from Menu > Profile > Edit Profile STEP 2: In the summary or experiences section, near the title, search for the icon of a rectangle with a “+” symbol STEP 3: A form will be showned asking to insert the direct URL to the content you want to link. How to find out the correct URL to insert depends on the service you are using. In Youtube is the link of a video that showned as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=codeXyz where code XYZ is an alphanumeric unique code for that video. In slideshare the url appears similar to http://www.slideshare.net/username/title-of-presentation. Generally, you need to open the specific content, copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and paste it on the required field. STEP 4 Edit the Title and the Description. Once you added the url, Linkedin asks to indicate the Title of the content and a description. This is an important step in order to give information to profile’s visitors and to reached within the search. Thats all, now the specified content is linked to your profile section. You can decide to move it from one experience to another without the need to upload it again. To to like that, you have to enter the edit mode of the specific content you want to move (just clicking on the pen simbol) and select from the drop down menu (“Move this media to”) the section you want to upload to. Are you using this feature to enrich your profile? Which kind of content you usually link?
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