Do you hold a position in your company or in your business that requires you to meet a lot of new people? If you are and do, then how good are your social networking skills for the business?

Are you aware that if your social skills are not up to ‘par’ or better, that it could and more likely will, cost your company kudos and contracts? No one wants to deal with or be associated with, people who are not of the same ilk as themselves. Remember the old addage that our parents drummed into us as kids? “You will be labelled by the company you keep” and that proverb is as relevant today as it was back in the days it was originally coined.

Quite aside from the fact that any company who gives any business a contract, will then be having a lot of contact with that company holding the contract; and if they are bad mannered or inconsiderate to deal with, then the chances are high that should something go awry, as often happens, that anyone who is inconsiderate to deal with will be even worse when the going gets rough. These are all ‘trigger’ points to be considered when doing business with a company or an individual within that company.

It may sound a bit “snobbish” and perhaps to a degree it is, but what if it is a pointer towards the character of the person you will be dealing with or of the mindset of that company? Is this really someone or a business that you want to be doing business with?

Just as there are certain body language signs to look for when assessing a persons character, so are there “company” signs to assess before being known to be associated with them. If the company, unbeknown to you, had a reputation in their neighbourhood of being unreliable, uncooperative and biased in some way, is this someone or a company, that you want to be seen doing business with? Even if they are the only suppliers in the state, I suggest you could save yourself a lot of money, worry and angst by finding a supplier or some other company more cooperative, pleasant and willing to do business with from interstate or inter region.

This is why it is imperative to do a thorough “due diligence” check on individuals and companys if you are seriously considering doing business long term with someone or some company. These due diligence checks can save you a lot of money in the short and long term not to mention protecting your personal and your business reputation.

On the other side of the coin, if you have excellent networking skills, are reliable, cooperative, considerate, fair in your dealings with people and protect your reputation; you will not only gain a lot of good Kudos by word-of-mouth (WOM) advertising, you are much more likely to pick up some very good contracts and people will enjoy dealing with you. This will make your work environment more pleasant and it is also much more profitable.

There is more option for social networking today than ever before. Now there really is no excuse for not doing it one way or another.

Today you can social network online through any number of community social bookmarking communities. These social bookmarking sites can be a hazard as well as a help. It just depends on your level of discipline as much as anything. If you are in business for yourself you will soon realise that you can spend waay too much time answering inane emails that do absolutely nothing to move your business forward.  (more…)

Everyone in business today is time short. There is always more that we want to do, have planned to do, than what we can actually get to do. This is no excuse though for not doing any business social networking.

Some business people have decided that they won’t do any social networking for business because they see that as a “perk” of being in business for themselves and decide they don’t have the time ‘just yet’ to go gallivanting around enjoying themselves. However, what they fail to realise is that they will really get to “gallivant around” a lot faster and with more financial security if they take the time to do some social networking with like minded business people.

Business social activities are enjoyable because you will be among a wide variety of people who have the same interests as yourself. (more…)

Some people often say “”Hey”? today instead of “excuse me” or “pardon” or “I beg your pardon” when they haven’t heard or understood what it is that you have said. Is this a rude and discourteous response to someone’s conversation? How does it make you feel when someone replies to you with a straight or cranky look and they say “hey” abruptly.

If you are like many people, you may feel almost insulted but definitely disinclined to repeat in full what you have just said to elicit that response. It could make you feel rejected, hurt, angry and any number of other things. But one of the things it does do is to mark the person who responds to an unheard or misunderstood question with “hey” is that they are bad mannered individuals.

In a peer group of uneducated people hanging around a corner ’shooting the breeze’ it may be the accepted practice. This is a case of “birds of a feather, flocking together” so it may be acceptable to the group.

However, if you are in a job interview and one of the interviewers asks you a question that you haven’t heard properly or understood, and you respond with “hey?” then don’t expect to have a successful outcome to that interview simply because you have immediately shown that you have no respect for other people or their feelings and are highly unlikely to be a good team player. If you are going to be in a team, then you have to (a) be acceptable to the other team members and (b) have to be able to get along with the other team members.

If you are in a casual social situation and you turn to someone jokingly and say “hey, what’s that” with a smile on your face it could be construed as being playful but if you turn to someone and say “hey?” abruptly without a smile then you are most likely going to be thought of as being rude and or angry over something.

Spoken language and body language often mirror each other quite well in meaning when rude people say “hey”. Next time someone says it to you, remember to take note of their facial features when they do so and in particular their eyes. These will always give you the precise meaning of what they are feeling/thinking/meaning when they speak so rudely to you.

If a person is in a more formal social situation like a cocktail party or after-work drinks with colleagues and someone responds with “hey?” to something that you’ve said, take notice of how you feel at the time. Saying “hey” is rude in any educated social activity with colleagues and in a formal social setting like a cocktail party it is definitely a “No-No” if you want to be invited to the next social gathering.

Social Networking with one million people reminds me of the old saying “how do you eat an Elephant?” The answer is surprisingly simple: One person at a time.

Unless you have many big computer screens and a Maharajahs mansion, you will always be writing an article for just one reader at a time at any one location. That’s right, it’s always one reader at one screen that you are ‘talking’ to, so there is absolutely no need to get stage fright at the thought of talking to a million people through writing an article for publication and syndication.

Each person is reading your article and interacting with the words that you the writer have put on the screen. If you are a good conversationalist the reader will enjoy your chat and if you are all uptight and nervous because you are talking to those one million people, your words will come out flat, stilted and hard to plough through. They will only continue reading if they persevere, and I don’t know about you, but me as a writer would much prefer my readers to enjoy our conversation, no matter how one sided it actually is.

The good thing about the internet though is that these conversations no longer need be one sided. People can now comment and start up conversations back with you via the comment section on blogs. This is every writers hope, that someone will reply to their opinion or thoughts on any given subject and that other readers will chime in and add their two cents worth to get a friendly and fun group together all talking and sharing information and opinions on the same subject.

This interaction is really what Google with all their latest updates and inclusions is after. People having conversations and actually communicating.

The real problem today is that many people are unable to communicate well through words. They either have a very limited vocabulary, are too lazy to write more than six words at a time or they can’t spell the words they would prefer to use. This is very sad because for the first time in history people have a way to communicate with everyone else but are now limited by their inability to do so coherently.

So to overcome this educational defect or character flaw, people have evolved ways around it by reverting to “text” talk. Text talk is where words are abbreviated into one or two syllables to get their meaning across. It works but is a really big limitation on conversations and sharing of ideas and concepts because it is such a limited means of communication.

Communication is about sharing a whole range of many different things in many different ways and as long as you can find your group to communicate with, you will never be alone providing you input your personality, thoughts, ideas, share your knowledge and are able to get something back from other people; then you have communicated well even if it has only been in text talk.

The operative word here is “talk” and that’s what you will always  be doing with each and every article that you write and gets read by each one of those one million people because it will always only ever be read by one person at a time.