more online networking?

Hi Ben,

I got invited to Naymze by one of my connections and went ahead and filled out the basic profile. It asked me to invite others and offered to import my Linked In connections list to do so. After about a half hour of work, it tells me the fee to upgrade and continues to tell me that any time I log in.

They send me e-mails saying "someone viewed your profile" and if I want to know who, just like with Linked In , I need to buy a premimum membership. I'll pass.

Two of my connections have invited me to Konnects. After the Naymes experience, I opted to not join in on that one.

I'm still fairly new at using Linked In and looking forward to attending my first MCC Live event in Novi in May.

Enjoy the weeken,
Susan

It's like the VHS and BETAmax wars all over again. Which professional network will become "the standard"?

At this point, I'd have to say LinkedIN is the gold standard for networking sites. By the way, MCC members can link up via the MCC LinkedIN group .

Facebook, which started out as a myspace competitor is making inroads as a professional network too. You'll be shocked to learn there's a MCC Facebook group too. We're everywhere!

I'll be happy of I never receive another invite to Plaxo Pulse, Naymz, Konnects, Blue Chip Expert, Spock, ecademy, Ryze, NotchUp or XING.

OK Ben, now you are really making me feel old. Someday you'll have to come by and listen to some of my vinyl records.

Shhhhh....don't tell Ben....I have an 8 track player! Can't get rid of it because it was a wedding gift...dont' want bad luck!

Linda Anger and I had an little chat about the many groups that are surfacing and she made an point about becoming overly diluted. Like anything else in business, you can only get out what you put in. Joining all the groups spreads one too thin. It is important to pick just what you can effectively handle. Being international, I already use LinkedIn for North America, TEN for South America, and eCademy for Europe, Asia, and Australia. The local presence of MCC is also of great value. Anything else would be overkill and reduce my effectiveness on all of them.

I like what Rick had to say from an International perspective.  Linkedin was started here in CA.  Ecademy is London Based started by Thomas Powers and TEN was started by Octavio Pitaluga who resides in Brazil.  Both Thomas and Octavio are quite active and open networkers to whom you can connect on Linkedin (in fact TEN started after Linkedin while Ecademy has been around a long time).

Speaking of open and active networkers on linkedin, you can connect with me there as well by using tbean@networkedinc.com.  It's amazing how much having "superconnectors" in your linkedin network opens the whole network out for you.  To prove it, link with Ron Bates (rbates@executive-advantage.com).  He has over 40,000 connections. I am guessing he doesn't know all of them personally.

A lot of rambling to tell you that it is important to understand why you are networking and what you expect to get from it.  Once you know that, you will need to build a strategy on how to accomplish your goals.  Ever wonder what Terry does, I help build that strategy with you.

BYBY (be your best you)

There does seen to be a lot of networking sites.  Between LinkedIn, MCC, Plaxo, Facebook and MySpace, I hardly have any "Spare" time for my work and personal email.  Yike!  Not to mention IMing.  How to choose?  And how to gracefully exit any that you need to weed out?

From my understanding, and I am new to this one, Plaxo somehow connects to several other networking sites so you can get updates for all of them at once instead of going to each site.  If anyone has been on this one long enough to know how it works, let me know.

My theory is to stick with a few that you get the most value out of.  It's also my practice as if I kept up with every network all the time, I'd have no time to do other work.

I think LinkedIn is the gold standard right now for business, IMHO, especially with all the features they've rolled out.