I love networking on the social web, as I do in real life. And I love having lots of friends and connections. In both realms I get great personal satisfaction out of being able to facilitate connections between people.

But I must admit that, for all that I have been participating actively online, one way or another, and in various groups, for over fifteen years, I think I still know how it all works offline better than I know how it works online.

It’s partly a problem about language.

I blame Facebook

Before Facebook I used to know what a friend was and I used to have a pretty good sense of the gradations of friendship and how types and levels of friendships can change over time. With Facebook – and other social networking platforms – the word “friend” became totally debased. A “friend” came to equal a keystroke, accepting a request from someone you did not know, and if you met them in real life might not want to even know, let alone be friends with.

And my personal belief (which I am happy to have challenged) is that once we accepted that a “friend” on Facebook was not necessarily a “friend” in the sense we were used to, an expectation built up on the social web that anyone should be willing to connect with anyone else, unless, say, they had reason to believe the other might be an axe murderer or some other unsavory type.

But for the benefit of those folks who just came in, being able to operate effectively as a business person on the social web involves, when it comes to the notion of being a friend, something akin to what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” .

With other ways of connecting online – as a “fan”, as “liking” someone or their Facebook page, as a connector or follower – there is not such a semantic challenge, but there can be a cultural challenge and for business there is a strategic business challenge.

There are two short versions of this challenge, one negative, one positive:

a) Negative: “If I decline or ignore this invitation to connect, fan, like, follow or whatever, could that be construed as offensive or arrogant and could that be bad for business?”

b) Positive: “What should my approach be to building connections on the social web, whether through initiating or responding, so that it fits my business plan strategically?”

Experts disagree with me

There are many people on various networks, some of them apparently quite successful or even extremely successful in business, who accept all or most invitations, send many invitations and pride themselves on the number of connections they have made.

I’m more selective. I have been told often by some colleagues why I am mistaken, lacking in understanding of networking, or just plain wrong.  I am unrepentant and unbowed.

I am consoled by statistics such as that, at this writing, my 635 first level connections on LinkedIn connect me to 12,951,796 people in the larger LinkedIn network: enough to keep me busy.

No short answer

I don’t believe there is a short answer to all this. I believe the right answer will be the one that fits the business strategy, so your right answer will almost certainly be different from the right answer for my business or even for the business of someone else in your industry.

There is no shortage of people who will offer to show you, whether gratuitously or for a price, how to do your social networking “the right way”. My aim as a social business mentor is to help businesses work out the right strategy for themselves and build their own capability to operate effectively in this space.

In this I am guided by the aphorism (with a bit of manipulation of the gender references):

“Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day: teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” (Original author unknown)

Would you like more on this topic?

I want to do some more thinking and consider writing some more posts about this topic. If you have comments to make, want to agree, disagree, contradict, or share stories, I hope you will toss your contribution in the pot here to help me cook up something that can be useful to those of us who still, after all these years, are finding our way on the social web.

Image credit: “Good Friends, Béziers” Anne in Béziers photostream, Flickr, Creative Commons

Whether you love Paris in the Springtime (don’t know, I’ve only been there in  winter), bagels and lox in New York (the only ones I’ve ever actually loved) or the cute way your dog looks at you when she’s hungry, if you have a photo (i.e. one you own) the people at ShareYourLove.com want you to visit and, as the name implies, share.

What is Share Your Love about?

This is a genuine feelgood project. I know four of the five principals personally and they are definitely Good Guys. I’ve had the benefit of a detailed briefing on the project but I’ll spare you that. The core concept is, as spelled out on the site:

ShareYourLove.com is about celebrating what we love to help some of the poorest people in the world.

Let’s face it, most of us are lucky and we have a lot to be thankful for. If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you have food, water and shelter covered. Many of our global neighbors aren’t so lucky and they need our help.

We are raising money for WaterAid with every image view. We chose water as our cause because having clean water on demand is a luxury most of us take for granted but 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. (WHO/UNICEF)

Today I uploaded this picture of local fishermen launching their boat to take their net out into the bay. It took only a couple of minutes to edit – including typing, then dragging and dropping, some words – and save.

The site is really easy to use. Uploading, cropping your picture and inserting some words plus adding some notes to go with the picture are all dead easy. The tools are all there and require no special expertise to use. And it is great to get little messages saying someone likes your picture.

I confess to having a challenge about “writing” on my pictures, but when one of the principals asked me was I going to add a caption, I went in and added captions. It’s not obligatory, but seems to be the way people are doing things.

Speaking of sharing love, I love that Dave, Rob, Matt, Lee and Steve have put in lots of hours without any promise of personal reward other than a warm innner glow, contributing a load of what would otherwise be some costly Webdev/programming and advertising/promotion.

This post is to support what they are doing – which provides fun for them and others who participate and provides support for good causes like their current support for WaterAid.

So ladies and gentlemen start your uploading engines, have fun and do good. It’s free to join.

What’s not to love?

In the first of these two posts on looking for market conversations on the Groupsite platform I mentioned that I had not discovered “just the group” for my purposes, much less several such groups.  

That said, I believe anyone looking for groups where they feel there is some shared interest could well find such groups on Groupsite. They are by no means all business oriented groups, although many are.

As an aside, I should mention that some time ago I happily recommended Groupsite as the preferred platform for a not-for-profit organization where I was at the time a member of the Board. We set up a closed group for the Board members and staff and another, more open group for the volunteers.  This has worked very well, as far as I could see. If you have some responsibility for a community group or company, especially at a Board or executive level, I am sure you will find Groupsite very congenial, not just for discussion threads, but for filing, notices of meetings, minutes storing and so on. It’s worth noting in that regard that the paid subscription versions, starting at a very modest $29 a month, all offer enhanced security.

Back to finding conversations on Groupsite.

One of the many things I like about Groupsite is the display of information about individual groups. With any group you can see at a glance the group’s focus, the number of members, whether anyone can join or it is by invitation or request.

You can also learn something about where members live. Judging by the groups I looked at, this information is only partially helpful, as the output presumably depends on the extent to which members have provided the basic data. For example, the information for the group in the screenshot above accounts for only 22% of the group’s membership: New York, NY USA (11%), Reno, NV USA (6%), New Haven, CT USA (5%).

Several search options

As well as the general keyword search, you can search on categories, with eighteen category listings, from Business/Finance to Other. Don’t neglect “Other”: there were 2,262 groups under “Other” when I looked today.

You can also search on Most Members, Most Active, Most Recent and Alphabetical.

Results from “Most Active” should be scrutinized.

One group, of which I was already a member, looked very interesting to me and I dived in, contributing to conversations, leaving endorsements for other members…Then today I found that all of the recent activity on the group was by – me. I then looked more closely and realized that the group, with 2,854 members, was not what I would call active in any realistic sense of the word.

You can filter search results by Keyword, Country, State and City.

Roll your own

Although the primary purpose of this exercise is to look at possibilities for finding groups where you can become part of the conversation and, at an appropriate time and in a way appropriate to the group, introduce members to your product or service, another approach is to set up your own group.

Establishing your own group on Groupsite is as easy as falling off the proverbial log. Provided you are logged in (membership is free), you can just click on the link “Create a Group” in the top left corner of your screen, fill in the required details and you’re off to the races. And entice or persuade some of your friends or colleagues to join – you don’t want to have one of those groups with only one member, however much you like your own company.

I’m thinking now that a post or two on setting up your own group could be helpful – in due course.

Do please share any thoughts on Groupsite or on the “looking for conversations” topic in general.

Following on from my recent posts about looking for conversations, starting with LinkedIn Groups (here and here), I’ve spent some time today on the Groupsite.com platform, searching for groups of possible interest to me and catching up with some of the groups I belong to on that site.

The exercise has reminded me of the fact that, typically, when I mention Groupsite (formerly CollectiveX) to people, it’s new information for them. At which point I always become an evangelist for the platform: it’s that good.

Incidentally, until I started writing this post I had not realized that my evangelism was helping fulfil one of Groupsite’s explicit guiding principles:

Engaged users are our sales force. Through every touchpoint, we inspire users to become Groupsite creators, champions and evangelists.

I had the good fortune to become aware of Groupsite quite a while ago, through Shaun Callahan, who has the excellent title on the Groupsite management team of Chief Involvement Officer. As Shaun’s bio there states, enthusiastically and in my observation accurately, “Shaun is focused on helping customers achieve a stronger return on involvement”.

The Company Overview states that “Groupsites are a powerful social collaboration tool for ordinary people in everyday groups”.

Search

Before looking more closely at groups to which I already belong, I spent some time in search mode, having first clicked the (not very obvious) “Find a Group” link at the top left corner of the site.  I used both the keyword-based search and the category search and found the category search more interesting. With the keyword search, I repeated my endeavour with LinkedIn, aimed at finding groups of professionals working from home.

Using the keyword phrase “home based” I found a handful of groups, the most populated with only 98 members and only eight in double figures.

Then I tried “work at home” (which the system read as “work home”): there was, not unexpectedly, a goodly number of MLM groups: there were also groups which were professional and specialized, e.g. homeland security specialists, and local, e.g. Tampa Bay. There were nine pages of groups showing up for that keyword, but membership of groups was down to 2 and 1 before I was half way through.

I then switched to using the Categories and focused on Business/Finance and Computers/Internet. I had a quick look at Family/Home but did not stay long there because the groups were, not unsurprisingly, about families and home – not, as far as I could ascertain in my scan, about professionals working from home.

For Business/Finance there were hundreds of pages. In both that category and in Computers/Internet, quite a few groups were local and/or specialized, such as the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Network or the SAP Elite group. There were a couple I found had catchy names, such as Paddytech, for IT professionals who work or have worked in Ireland, and “Vegemite in the Old Town Square – For Kiwis and Aussies living or working in Poland”.

One of the largest groups in the Business/Finance category was the LinkedIn Forum with 2,854 members, including me.

Cost

The basic service is free, with the service including all standard features, unlimited users, 250 MB storage and up to five subgroups. Then there are various add-on premium services, for branding, enhanced security etc, at $9 a month each and then packages of services in various configurations – details here.

Summing up

In terms of finding groups where professionals working from home hang out, this was not a hugely productive exercise.  Not just because I could not find clusters of professionals clearly working from home, but also because I realized that some groups have only one or two members.

On the other hand, spending some time scanning through the lists showed me that Groupsite is evidently attractive to many groups, internationally and across a wide range of professional and personal interests.

So one way of finding interesting conversations as part of connecting with the market could be to scan through the listings of groups and find ones where you have some shared interest, whether in terms of the group’s professional or hobby interest or local/regional membership, or both: then join and participate (for some groups you have to apply or be invited).

For example, I found a group with a Web focus and with members from my locality and am considering joining that.

The question arises as to how much conversation is actually going on in the various groups. As we saw with LinkedIn, the fact that a group is set up and perhaps has substantial numbers does not necessarily mean there is a conversation happening.

Coming up

In the next post in this series I will share some more about Groupsite, specifically about some of the features and how we can use them to help us in our networking.

Then I plan to tackle Yahoo! Groups, which I expect to be a bit more unwieldy than Groupsite or even LinkedIn, but an interesting and potentially productive platform once you get the hang of how it works.

After that I will look at Ning.

If you have experience with or observations to make about Groupsite, or indeed any of these platforms, I trust you will share with us via the comments.

This is a follow-on from my post yesterday, on looking for relevant online conversations, starting with the professional-focused networking site LinkedIn.

On my first attempt to find groups via (as I recall) the search term “home based professionals” the result was some fifty pages of groups. With ten a page, that made around 500 groups.

The listings included:

• Starting Home Business
• Consultants Network

The first of these was of general interest, but I wasn’t sure that at this point I wanted to get into discussions about starting a home based business.

The second – Consultants Network – looked interesting, especially as it had a big membership at 118,911, and what looked like a busy discussion space, with 85 discussions listed, far more than I had seen for other groups.

The Consultants Network group describes itself as:

A group that unites all strategy, marketing, finance, business, IT consultants & freelancers. With over 100,000+ global members the largest consultancy community on LinkedIn. (consulting, management, business, interim, freelance, advisory, consultant, recruitment, network, professionals)

I had to submit a request to join. That did not bother me, because I like the idea that there is some process of vetting going on. Although I’m wondering what’s happening. It’s about three days since I submitted that request and I’ve since sent a follow-up. No reply of any kind yet. (Update: three weeks on – April 6 – there is still no response – I have also sent messages, via LinkedIn connections, to the nominated owner and nominated manager of the group, neither of whom has replied.)

By way of a footnote to this post, as I started writing I thought, why just LinkedIn? Why not Yahoo!? Why not other networks and forums?

Why not, indeed! Especially as, at this writing, this area of professionals working from home is not looking a likely area for discussion on LinkedIn.

So I’ve decided to do a series on various social networking platforms, under the general heading of Looking for Conversations. Next I might have a look at Yahoo! Groups.

In the meantime, have you had any interesting, useful or curious experiences with LinkedIn Groups and if so would you like to share them? I hope you will leave a comment.