Online Networking for Collaboration in Social Networks

Article Summary

John S Veitch
The Network Ambassador

You can do business with anyone. Goods or services are exchanged for money. You don't need to know who you dealing with.
But if you are collaborating with other people WHO they are is everything.
Scientists tell us that we cannot imagine what atoms are really like.
An atom is a set of electrical particles of no size held together by both strong and weak relationships.
Groups of people are joined in similar mysterious ways, sometimes closely bonded and sometimes loosely contained.
Here's a back-grounder on my own networking.
In the web site New Zealand Dances (Closed 2000) 700+ people contributed letters or photos or information to the site.
I wasn't thinking about "networking" or building a large valuable network. I was (I thought) building a customer base.
Ryze opened in 2002. I didn't understand it. I didn't join. "What a waste of time I told myself."
Ryze is a very efficient way to discuss topics of interest, to learn about the world and to learn about people. I couldn't understand that, then.
LinkedIn started in 2004. I joined inside the first year, but it wasn't very useful to me. See the pattern here; I dropped the ball a second time.
The movement of Ryze members to LinkedIn that helped me to get my network growing.
I realized the potential of LinkedIn for New Zealand and I started to deliberately build a large network.
The latest tool I recommend is Twitter. Twitter is very good at helping to make that distant relationship a little more personal and stronger.
The Apoptosis Concept
The cells in your body communicate with each other, and the body detects cells which are malformed, and a "die signal" from other cells turns the malformed cell off.
Apoptosis maintains a healthy body over many years. Otherwise we get cancers, malformed cells that refuse to die. That idea has lots of relevance to online networking.
People are very generous and cooperative online, but also very sensitive to anyone who is "malfunctioning".
There is a strict online social protocol, unwritten, which those of us who've been active for a long time understand. Everyone has to learn the rules.
You do so by copying what the best people do. You absorb good behaviour, and you emulate the people you admire.
You can't learn social behaviour in a class, nor from a book, you have to learn by full immersion.

If you need the original article it's here.