Some adages have earned their distinction--like the one that says it's not what you know but who you know that counts.
Fact is, skill and grit only get you so far. "Networking is not even a question of 'Should I?' It's a lifeblood," says Susan RoAne, author of How to Work a Room. "As an entrepreneur, if you don't have a network, you will keep reinventing the wheel."
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Networking has taken on a whole new meaning in the Internet age. Keeping up with the competition demands cultivating contacts at warp speed, and that means working your shtick online.
There are plenty of tools--many of them free--and more are on the way. All help you stay connected to people you know and spark relationships with those you don't--including customers, suppliers, partners and advisers. If you aren't using these services already, sign up as soon as you finish reading this article. If you're no stranger to online networking, check out some of the more advanced services.
Online networking tools include the networks themselves--basically, webs of millions of people who are just a few clicks away from receiving an electronic message from anyone within the network--and the nifty little software applications that help to maintain and update those networks.
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The most recognizable online networks are Facebook and News Corp's MySpace. Both are mainly aimed at the under-24 set, and neither is particularly designed as a business tool, though Facebook is trying to make a charge.
"There has been a lot of discussion about Facebook adding business profiles," says Austin Hill, a serial Internet entrepreneur and founder of Brudder Ventures, an angel investment firm. "The context allows for very different things. Facebook is a fun place, but I would feel awkward writing a large business proposal [in Facebook]."
As business networks go, LinkedIn trumps the competition. Formed in 2001, the free service now boasts 12.5 million users, including bigwigs at places like Wal-Mart, Apple and Merck. In the handful of minutes it takes to fill out a simple profile (name, job description, contact information), LinkedIn can expand your Rolodex by thousands of names--making it just about the hottest happy hour around.
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Example: Say you're looking for accounting services. Just type "accountant" into LinkedIn and up will pop a list of contacts with the word "accountant" in their personal profile. Depending on how much access that person has agreed to grant other members of the network, you may be able to contact her directly or--if you're not such a close "friend"--simply send a message via LinkedIn. Call it e-mail with a buffer.
"At my startup, there was one vendor at which we were trying to get access to one specific department, and it was impossible to find anyone who could help us," recalls Hill, who boasts more than 500 contacts on LinkedIn. "It was a large company and we just kept getting the run around. So we went on LinkedIn and started sending senior members of the company questions. Within two days we were in contact with the right group, with the right introduction and we were able to start doing business with them very quickly."
LinkedIn's latest feature is the "Answers" section, which allows members to lob questions to their entire network; users also can tag the questions based on a particular topic. Those who answer rack up "expert" points, and responses from the most highly revered experts are featured on the "Answers" homepage.
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Yet another benefit of LinkedIn: Each person on the network gets his own Web address (or URL), making him searchable by Google and Yahoo!, so long as he includes his name in the URL.
If you run a home-based business and want to connect with millions of others like you, check out APsense.com. Launched three months ago, APsense now has a modest 13,000 users but is growing at roughly 100 users per day. Like LinkedIn, APsense lets users maintain personal profiles, and also offers access to common interest groups and a slew of business blogs.
One cool feature--called the "Hot or Not exchange"--gives members a chance to post full-page profiles of their businesses, including descriptions of products, customer testimonials and contact information. While you can't pay for such prime digital real estate (the featured businesses are chosen by algorithm), you can increase your odds by voting for other businesses that show up on the page. The more times you vote ("hot" or "not"), the greater your odds of being featured.
Then there are the nifty little applications that help you maintain those networks. One of these, Plaxo, now with some 15 million users, recognizes any changes to the contact information of any Plaxo member and automatically updates that data in, say, your Microsoft Outlook contact list. Plaxo's free service also includes birthday alerts and electronic cards. And for the height of convenience, Plaxo's Pulse service--launched this week--will aggregate all of your online social networks and send out an information "feed" that captures any new activity all on one page.
A nice complement to Plaxo is Anagram (found at GetAnagram.com). Instead of having to enter contact information into an e-mail program, this service will pull contact names and numbers right from the Web, your desktop or e-mail signatures and plunk them into the correct fields in an Outlook database or Palm personal digital assistant. The newest version of the software even gins up a digital map for a given address in your contact list. (Word of caution: The software is still a tad buggy.)
Finally, there's Twitter, a service that allows you to blast a two-sentence message via e-mail or text to all of your Twitter contacts. (Call it a mini-blog.) Like Pulse, Twitter comes in newsfeed form. If it sounds like a waste of time, some entrepreneurs swear by it. "I've used it for ad-hoc business meetings in cities when I'm traveling for a meeting," says entrepreneur Hill. "People come up to me at conferences all the time and ask me about things that I put on my feed."
