Moem's Journal
It's not Myspace...wait, it's not even LiveJournal.
Commenting To 
23rd-Sep-2009 02:44 pm - Networking
bedrijfslogo
...is more than just a buzzword. Or so I hope.
Recently, I've been working on doing it better. I've not been very busy this year, work-wise, and I've had plenty of interesting, non-work related things to to; all very nice, but I figured it's about time I invest a bit of energy in getting some nice projects in the future.


So I joined LinkedIn. It's a social networking site with a difference: the focus is on finding business contacts, not on making friends or keeping up with your family. You can add 'friends' (connections), much like you can do on LJ; but only if they accept your invitation, which generally means that they have to be people that you already know in some manner, or who are interested in you for other reasons.
The idea is that you dress up your profile with things like your current function, past experience, education and a tiny little picture. Also, it's good to describe in brief what it is that you do, how you see your job/profession and what your goals or ambitions are (if you have any).
It's all in the interest of being visible to others. Which eventually may lead to job offers, business inquiries and the like.

An interesting side effect is that you may very well find, or be found by, people from your past. Much like on Facebook, Myspace or LJ.
For obvious reasons, people usually use their real name on LinkedIn; this makes it possible to search for familiar names (and the faces that go with them). For example, I entered the name of a former boyfriend of my sister. He used to be in Art School and wore very fashionable sweaters in graphical patters, which I envied him for. Now he has a boring button-down shirt and a square job at an utterly square cable company. But he still has that oddly large lower lip (which I did not envy him for at all).

LinkedIn has a feature named Groups; you can join one, or several, which means that you can display the group's logo on your profile, and participate in group discussions, if you want. Of course, I looked for a BookCrossing group. And yes, I found one... but it had only two members, and looked dead in the water.
The group owner was our own former CEO Scott! I asked him if he'd be interested in handing the group managership over to me. He was happy to do so, because it meant that he would not have to do anything about it anymore, and the group could come back to life.
So now I'm the manager of this group. The first thing I did was make some nice new logos for it. New members are now starting to come in. Who knows what it's all good for.

All in all, it's interesting, and potentially a useful investment of my time. You can see my profile here.

Oh, and with all these new potential contacts, I felt that an update to my company website was long overdue. So I just added some new pictures to it. That's the first positive outcome, right there!
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