Part IV: And the Winner is…
If you spend any time online, for work or play, chances are pretty good that you belong to at least one social network. Whole blogs are devoted to the subject of social networking and making the most of these communities, and many experts have weighed in on their choice for best networking sites.
Some of my favorite sites are:
Ignite Social Media
123 Social Media
PR 2.0
Social Media Explorer
Going Social Now
But what I’d love to do is hear from my readers about which network they have found the most useful in their marketing. Is there a site that offers something unique that has made all the difference? Have you found the users on a particular site to be more receptive to making new contacts? Is there a site that gives you the best collection of networking tools?
Leave me a comment with a link to your profile on your favorite networking site. Next month, we’ll announce the winner with a post that brings together the collective comments for the top three social networking sites–the sites that have what we would term a true Networlding community experience. This is your opportunity to voice your opinion, and hear with other users have to say about their Web 2.0 experience. So vote today and tune in for the results to see how many others agree with you!
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Melissa Giovagnoli
Founder and President
Networlding: Helping You Build Better Business Faster
Speaking, Coaching, Online Marketing Consulting Leveraging the Science of Networks
Part II: Choose Wisely
There are literally thousands of sites that you can use for social networking. Some of them cater to specific interest groups such as an industry (technology, fashion, non-profit) or location (city, state, country), while others are diverse in their members’ interests and used for socializing on a global scale. Obviously everyone has heard of MySpace (www.myspace.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). These two sites hold the Alexa Ranks of #6 and #8 most popular websites in the world–and for good reason. They have a set of characteristics which make them extremely valuable from a personal and professional standpoint. However, there are other networks that have similar characteristics and which are gaining in popularity.
Orkut.com (www.orkut.com) is a Google owned and operated social networking site that is coming up fast with an Alexa page rank of 11. Hi5.com (www.hi5.com), Friendster.com (www.friendster.com), and Skyrock.com (www.skyrock.com) are also in the top 50. It seems like there are unlimited options—and a Web 2.0 marketer may feel like a kid in a candy store with all these great sites to choose from.
But one of the most important elements to successful social networking is being consistent and really building your network based on personal interaction. All too often you see people creating profiles and logging in once a week to blast out a generic message to their network in a spam-like fashion. This is simply not going to get you anywhere in Web 2.0, and in fact, it is going to work to your detriment. One of the most important elements of social networking is the genuine connection that your contacts must feel for you and your company.
That means that unless you have unlimited time and resources, you need to be able to pick a small handful of networks and genuinely cultivate your contacts without wasting time. The question then becomes, “which ones are the best?” Join me tomorrow for Part III where I will discuss: “The Definition of a World-Class Network.”
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