Social Networking

Strategies and tactics to help keep your professional reputation in check.

Within your LinkedIn profile, recommendations, which you must seek out and approve from contacts of your choosing, give employers a fuller view of you as a direct report, boss, colleague, or client. But you can also do more harm than good with a LinkedIn recommendation.

You don't have to be on a social network 24 hours a day to enjoy the benefits. Keeping your profile up to date on LinkedIn, staying in touch with former colleagues on Facebook and jumping into the occasional conversation on Twitter is enough to build your social network persona and might find you that perfect hire for a job opening or provide the answer to a vexing question.

Spending a little time on Facebook and other social networking sites is a ritual for many of us every morning. And afternoon. And evening. But, hey, it's nice, harmless fun -- isn't it? It isn't as if you were putting your identity or your computer at risk. Are you? Well, ask anyone who was whacked by the recent Koobface worm.

Here's a quick rundown -- in no particular order -- of a handful of CIOs and IT VPs we uncovered who Twitter regularly. Those most active seem to be in the healthcare, government and education fields. We'll do a sequel when we come up with more.

LinkedIn's main slogan is "Relationships Matter." This cuts to the core of the social network's philosophy and the way it designed the site: connect with people you know. But the steady emergence of LinkedIn open networkers (LIONs), an increasingly significant group of LinkedIn users who accept the majority of invitations to connect on LinkedIn, no matter whether they know the person or not, has implications for LinkedIn, its user base and the future of social networks in general.

CIOs dealing with e-discovery in a Web 2.0 world must learn new ways to limit the cost, business disruption, legal liability and potential public embarrassment from what employees say and where they say it. You have to plan for how you will collect data when you don't control it.

During the past two years, Facebook became the darling of Silicon Valley, watching its user base grow exponentially as its founder bombastically turned down billion dollar acquisition offers. But as the sobering realities of a tightening economy set in, it turns out LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, might be on track to build a more stable and immediately profitable business model that, unlike Facebook, doesn't rely solely on advertising and never-ending injections of venture capital.

If your social networking modus operandi has been to say yes to LinkedIn connection requests without much deliberation, consider these three reasons why you should be selective about your connections.

Today, we live and breathe the Internet. Web 2.0 means its use is active not passive; we use it for information, to garner opinion, pass comment, shop, share photos and engage with like-minded souls and much, much more. But, have business tools like intranets kept pace with this level of interactional behaviour?

Get those customers’ profiles and their networks to work for you as their online identities are usually in more than one social network.

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