In the past, I used to think that the best way to network was face to face meetings with potential contacts. While I still feel that face to face networking is a great way to meet people, it’s important to remember that the world is getting smaller and smaller due to the internet. To that end, I highly recommend using internet based social and professional networking sites such as Linked In and Facebook.
I can honestly say that since going out on my own I have made more contacts which were able to help me build my business, by using Linked In than face to face networking. At the same time, I still encourage creating lists of all your “real time” contacts and making sure to not ignore to them while building your “virtual” networks. In fact I spend an hour a day working on building up my Linked In network.
For those of you truly interested in building a professional network using Linked In, I highly recommend reading the following blog: http://siliconv.wordpress.com/the-linkedin-network/ which was written by one of my contacts, Mickael Nadeau.
For now these are my thoughts on how to network effectively.
Tags: Networking, professional, social
