Since when has ‘become a better networker’ been the point to going to networking functions? It seems that most of the ‘networking experts’ out there are stuck in the features and benefits mode of business networking events.  Almost every general business networking event I have attended in the last six years had someone spruiking the ultimate goal that you should ‘become a better networker’.

This approach misses the mark by miles and from what I have observed commonly creates ‘business networker’ drones. People focused on improving their profile as ‘networker’ rather than learning inter-personal skills and leveraging business networking events to add value to their business. Traditional ‘networking experts’ miss the “Why?” and the “Value”.

Think for a moment about how many networking functions have you attended? How about how many of those networking events had a ‘networking expert’ speaker. Someone at the front of the room giving you tips on how to ‘become a better networker’.

Personally I’ve been to loads of them!

The objection I have in respect of the greater majority of these ‘networking experts’ is that they are no better than the average person in the room. They are teaching what they would like to learn the most; not an unknown thing in any industry. Most have bought into their own propaganda about how good they are.

It’s been said that “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world”. I believe that this is true. On the micro scale of a business networking event, I translate this to ‘the only reason to give a speech is to make a difference and have an impact on the lives of the people in the room’.

So next time you attend a business networking event with speaker profiled as a ‘networking expert’ filter out the noise of why you should ‘become a better networker’. Instead focus on the little gems of inter-personal relationship and communication skills that will help you to improve your business. Most of the time they will be there. If you can learn one more skill at each event you attend, you and your business will grow.

We’ve all heard the concept that you become a product of your environment, and that your income will be the average of your five closest friends; or is it business associates?

Revenue had taken a bit of a dip in recent months and I was contemplating why. This wasn’t the reason I went searching through my email program. It simply struck me, as I looked at the recipients, the number of email threads with specific people, and the number of emails per thread with those people, that I was spending a lot of time talking to the same people with no outcome. 

So I invested some more time in looking back historically and without being too analytical, working off memory instead of comparing bank accounts and running complex formulas in a spreadsheet, I compared income during different periods to the type, volume and complexity of the email traffic. Here’s what I discovered.

I earned more money when I sent less emails to more people. The overall volume of emails during times of higher revenue generation was approximately 23.5% of the total and generated more than 87.3% of the revenue for the period reviewed. BTW I looked back over a period of almost 9.5 years. Also the ration of revenue in for effort expended in delivery plus hard COGS (cost of goods sold) was much higher … i.e. more profitable.

I earned less money, worked longer hours, and was generally unhealthier (later reflection) when I sent more emails to less people. Upon further reflection I realised I was a lot less happy and this rubbed off on my family.

What does all of this mean? Well I’ll leave that to your own individual interpretation. What’s clear to me is that less is certainly more. The clue though is to recognise what you are doing, interpret it in the context of the situation, and   lead yourself out of what could become a very self destructive parttern of behaviour. It is very easy to become wrapped up in a cycle of business busyness with the same people and delude oneself that the outcomes will follow. There is a time when it is appropriate to cut your losses and change direction. One of the greatest challenges is having the perspective to be able to do that at the right moment!

I encourage everyone to look at their email communications or whatever medium it is you use primarily for your business communications and unless you are very specialised in  your field with less than a handful of other people with whom you need to communicate regularly you may find similar patterns. If the patters are the good ones (i.e. lead to high revenue and profitability) keep doing what you are doing. If they are the negative ones, consider adapting your approach to the way you conduct your business immediately.

So what stops people from publishing their thoughts to the world? Most likely 99% of the time it will be fear in some form.

Fear of criticism – Guess what? Not everyone likes you anyway so eat cement and move on.

Fear of saying publicly what you think because it might box you into a category – You can’t be all things to all people. You do have a special talent and other things you are really good at so celebrate those. As I’ve already said, not everybody likes you anyway, so be a completely authentic you and even those who don’t like you will at least respect you.

Fear that it is not perfect or it is not schmick enough or not polished – Who cares? Very rarely will anything anybody does be absolutely perfect in the first version, and no I don’t mean the draft version, I mean the final copy. Your journey to perfection starts with these moments of learning. With public speaking, if you only ever speak to yourself in the mirror after 20 times you will still be just talking to yourself. If you speak to 20 audiences by the 20^th time you will naturally improve. By the 100^th time the difference in your skills levels will be even greater. The same can be said for ‘public’ writing. BTW, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a spell checker. You should!

Fear of …. fill in your own blank and then deal with it!

People want to know who you are and what you stand for. They want to be able to at least feel like they know you. That, your general public reputation, trusted third party referrals and their gut will tell them whether they think and feel as though they can trust you at whatever level is necessary for potential interactions between you.

So next time you have a thought, write it down, and once you have written it down, publish it without delay. Don’t squirrel together a bunch of thoughts that only you ever read once more before you die. If you have something to say and you believe it is helpful, valuable, and possibly even inspiring, then tell the world.

The following YouTube video by US television personality and anti-crime activist John Walsh, at first glance, is an OWS (Occupy Wall Street) style chant from a public figure. Perhaps it is not intended that way and he simply wanted to keep the message short or the person who posted it to YouTube edited out the important last bit; who knows? Either way, I believe it is unfair to throw a standard response or solution at an entire demographic. We don’t lock up all Muslims just because some committed terrorist acts (please no comments re Gitmo)!

I like the general gist of John’s  message, and I believe he is right about professionals in those areas and more; let’s not forget nurses. They deserve more, they deserve better!

In finding a solution however, it’s too easy to appoint blame to one or more demographics and say they caused it, or even if they didn’t they have to bail us out. What would happen if big business were simply taxed more? How much recovery would that really bring about and how many jobs would that really save? It’s not a structural or a strategic solution to a problem that can’t be fixed by what is the equivalent of a bandaid on a broken arm. Yes the nurses, police, and paramedics might be saved but now they would have more work than they could handle, since the same speech maintains that civil unrest is caused through poverty … I tend to agree that poverty is a contributing factor … but to draw a direct immediate connection between layoffs one week and crime spikes the next as a response is a bit left field for me.

As a result of higher taxes and less profits (some of) the (big) business will have a difficult time keeping all of their people employed, so now, according to the speech, because of increased unemployment there will be increased crime; and one can imagine that by extension there will be more need for medical professionals as there will be increased stabbings and other attacks and undoubtedly there will be a load more people stressed out of their brains with the accompanying conditions or side-effects ranging from depression to attempted suicide.

For me, I believe the solution to many of these problems lies in entrepreneurialism and small to medium business with governments enabling them to create jobs, and governments working with (if necessary forcing) the central banks to create the fiscal environment that incentivises business and people alike to increase spending.

A few days ago my brother-in-law commented to my wife about how the unemployment level in the Netherlands was becoming extremely bad. OK. Between you and me the rate of unemployment as of November 2011 is 4.9% and thus only half the European Union as a whole of 9.8% (Reference: http://bit.ly/tDK0Py). Certainly the Netherlands as a country has known worse times, but it is a stark contrast to the levels of 10 years prior which were almost half this…. ahhhhh the golden years!!!

Nonetheless the effects of unemployment are (or should be) clear, especially in countries that have such luxurious social security systems as the Netherlands and Germany (I just know I am going to be in trouble with some people for that comment). The more unemployed there are, the less taxes are being collected and the more monies are leaving the state coffers. The general feeling in the community is one of low energy and people as a whole aren’t enthusiastic about spending what little they have which has a knock on effect with other businesses that suffer and eventually have to lay off more staff.

Now more than ever we need visionary leaders in politics and business to chart a course that will enable the economies of the world to be steered commercially back to prosperity! Business is the answer, not governments. Governments now more than ever need to step out of the way of business and be supportive rather than obstructive. Something they should have been doing from the start. Business owners also need to realise their responsibility in the rebuilding of our economies and work both commercially and socially in delivering their products and services.

I welcome your thoughts!

In addition to traditional considerations such as trademarks and proximity to other names, in the Internet age, serious consideration needs to be given to whether or not the name will be available with your preferred generic top-level domain (gTLD) e.g. .com, .co.uk, .nl, .de, .com.au et al. As most people will know trying to match a generic name using dictionary terms and a serious gTLD is often like playing the lottery. So it begs the question, is it better to invent a new name that no one has ever heard or would you be better off using a name that describes what you do?

The simple answer is that it really depends on what you wish to achieve in and with the business. The two schools of thought on the subject go like this.

Made up names are the strongest in terms of possible domain name registration with a serious gTLD and in terms of being able to protect yourself with a trademark. In this regard think Google, eBay, PayPal, Twitter, Facebook; no Facebook was not a real word before Mark Zuckerberg and his friends popped a few jolt colas and pizzas on night at uni.

A word of caution though, although these types of names are easier to protect they do not tell your target market what it is you do or the types of goods and/or services you provide. The result can be a higher marketing budget requirement as you seek to establish brand recognition in your niche.

Names that describe what you do provide immediate identification in the mind of the consumer as to what the brand is about (e.g. EAST SYDNEY THAI). The downside of this however is that domain names are rarely available and establishing a trademark may be next to impossible.

Unless of course you are clever and do what the Bavarian Hospitality Group did in Australia, namely they trademarked “Pure Bier™”!! Yeh! I know what you are thinking. You can just see some blokes sitting around a table with a Maß of Munich Helles thinking let’s try to trademark “Pure Beer” … at the time I believe Cadbury was fighting what proved to be a losing battle over obtaining a trademark for the colour purple, or at least the shade of purple they use. Then, our German friends, realising that this was probably too much trying to come the raw prawn and at the same time also realising how thoroughly ridiculous the Australian public service is they decided to add the German spelling to one word!! Hey presto, we have a trademark of an otherwise near impossible phrase to trademark! …und bedankt!

But back to our friends with the Thai restaurant. Imagine someone opened up shop around the corner, down the road, or across town and called themselves SYDNEY EASTERN THAI. If one could obtain a trademark then it would be difficult to stop the other obtaining a trademark. In terms of domain names and being found, they will both be competing heavily for the same space as the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Ranking (SER) work they would perform for each would probably be very similar; and SER & SEO work and the cost thereof is a whole different discussion.

Whichever way you go give the name of your business due consideration. If you intend to run anything more than a local operation with customers coming only from a five kilometre radius then the name and the further implications of that name in terms of domains, trademarks, SER, SEO etc must play a role in the decision you reach.

When journalists finally catch up they (more often than not) simply start to rehash what the masses have already published. Some interviews and video footage are spliced in for good measure and these are repeated ad nauseam (during a breaking news event). Ironically, quite often the videos are grabbed YouTube, Viddler or similar so even they aren’t original.

Then the same basic system of syndication that is still in place kicks in and the story is published several days, even weeks later through various channels. The story is used as filler next to other filler to justify the sale of papers, television advertising dollars or whatever.

Journalism used to be about developing a story, investigating both sides, uncovering the facts and presenting the case. These days it is about either paraphrasing and rewording social media contributions, or presenting a scenario based on personal opinion or directed by company policy

Just to clarify, I am not against the media channels taking advantage of the live on-the-spot content that is being created by everyday men and women. I think it is pretty smart and shows how the industry is progressing with the technology and way of the world.

What I disagree with is the way it is rehashed and reused and regurgitated constantly to fill spots because they are too lazy to go out and find stories that are news worthy and report them. What I also disagree with is that these ‘news repeaters’ are being giving journalistic protection because they are employed by a media company, and maybe somewhere in the past they picked up a piece of paper with their name on it declaring they had passed a course in journalism. At the same time others who genuinely report news, new news, and interesting news, and whose content is then taken and used by the same media channels, these people are not afford the same rights and protection under the journalism laws.

Me: “What do you do?”

… to which I received the response either

FSP: “eh … what do you mean?”

… or they proceeded to recite the entire glossy corporate brochure by heart. Every one was wearing name tags with their name and the company so you knew where they were from and unless you were a complete industry outsider (in which case you wouldn’t be at the reception anyway) you knew what the company did. So I’d ask again,

Me: “Yes, but what do YOU do?”

FSP: “eh … what do you mean?”

… I remained tight lipped and allowed a pregnant pause to ensue …

FSP: “eh … well I’m a XYZ Manager” or  “I work in the XYZ department”

Me: “Let me ask it differently; what do ***YOU*** do that adds value to your clients?”

The majority of the responses to this were along the lines of …

FSP: “What do I what?”

In all fairness there were the occasional good ones, possibly proving the 5% 95% rule.

For now forget the question about value though and go back to the original question, ‘what do you do?’. What I found amazing was that these people all seemed to identify themselves as part of a corporate machine that does ‘something’, as opposed to being able to articulate what it is that they do within that environment that differentiates them as a person, an expert in their field, or a professional who makes a difference.

Remember that this was an industry reception so there was no need to tell peers what their company does … everyone in the room pretty much knew what each of the companies did. I would have thought it more important to tell your peers what makes you the big swinging dick of your company or your department, blow your own trumpet, beat your own drum, and don’t bore me to tears with your corporate slogans.

Certainly this type of reaction is not exclusive to the financial services industry; I have seen it at other more generic neworking events and receptions. What stood out for me on this occassion was the number of people who seemed firewalled from the reality that they work in a service industry and that their right to survive (at least should) depend(s) upon the value they bring to their clients. Clearly the financial services companies they all work for are not creating a work environment that fosters this understanding; or am I simply over-reacting?

About Paul J. Lange:

Paul J. Lange is a business mentor and business performance coach who helps small to medium enterprise and entrepreneurs to apply big business, enterprise disciplines and solutions to gain a competitive advantage and increase profits. 

Paul’s ‘Business DIET’© system has helped countless entrepreneurs and business owners around the world to launch start-ups, expand existing operations, and greatly improve bottom lines.

Paul is also one of Australia’s most connected management consultants, and leading business strategists, with a passion for helping corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners who are committed to achieving outstanding results.

Paul’s support will help you to develop strategic direction, implement it, execute and make more money. He will have you starting to work on your business, instead of in your business, right from day one; and if you have already started down this path, he will help you to complete the transition to business owner from business manager.

Web: http://www.paullange.com.au
Twitter: http://twitter.com/pauljlange
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pauljlange
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/user/paullange
Klout: http://www.klout.com/pauljlange
Peerindex: http://www.peerindex.net/pauljlange
Empire Avenue: http://www.empireavenue.com/pauljlange

For example G+ was unavailable to Google Apps accounts for months in the beginning and additional Google Docs storage is still unavailable to Google Apps users forcing them to go to third party solutions like Box…. BTW, I’m very happy with Box (909.6 TB of fully redundant cloud data storage with version control … awesome) but would have preferred everything in one place and the interoperability between Box and Google Apps is still not 100%

Now G+ Hangouts are giving an error on Google Apps accounts making the system unusable. The error is “Sorry, our servers have encountered an error, please try calling again. Reason Code: 15″ The problem is not a new one. They have been there before so I imagine that the testing protocols weren’t tight enough when releasing some new feature. The problem is actually attracting any attention to the problem and having it resolved. Google’s support in this area is worse than (by comparison) the worst possible offshore call centre that is representing a bunch of rogue used car salesmen.

I suspect Google earns more money from advertising presented to their free users than they do from revenues from premium Google Apps accounts and that contributes to the lack of attention they give Google Apps when they introduce new technology… or it is a lot simpler and less sinister and they are just totally apathetic by nature? 

Support apathy appears to be standard operating procedure for the greater majority of Google. Google Apps is awesome and Google Apps support people are awesome (based on my personal experience) but the rest of the Google family appear as if they couldn’t give a damn about the Google Apps platform and helping their PAID users. 

… I have a dream, that one day all of the Google family will be as good as their Google Apps premium support, I have a dream that one day the Google Apps family will actually test stuff on Google Apps as a part of their pre-release testing, I have a dream that one day all Google accounts will be equal. … I’m not sure what we have to do to realise this dream, perhaps rally people to march on Mountain View CA, or perhaps a global Occupy Google movement!! … anyway, that is enough rambling for one Saturday morning! 

Thomas Power posted a very interesting article on Ecademy with the following video explaining how he sees Google+ creeping up on everyone and how it is a B2B matchmaking system. There are few people in the world who are as authoritative as Thomas Power on social business networking. He is the co-founder and chairman of the world’s first online social business network, Ecademy.com

What jumps out at me in this regard is the need for a new security platform. A third party solution that is independent of the different systems. Google, Google+, Facebook, Twitter deploy a range of technologies to track you and your behaviour. When Thomas’s prediction becomes a reality it will mean that the front door to your life is wide open. Some might say that is already the case now. Okay, if that is so, when all of this happens in the next 1,000 days it will mean that your front door will be wide open with you standing bent over stark bollock naked waiting to be sodomised!

Why? Because the security will be provided by the people accessing your data!

What we need is a security system that matches the real time and intuitive nature of the networks. A form of AI (artificial intelligence) based security for social and mobile from independent providers that can defend the data that is important to you and actively pursue, apprehend and punish the Google+ and other bots that might try to do something naughty with your data, even once you have given it to them.

For example, you give them access to certain information for a purpose with a very narrow focus. However the security system in tracking what they do with your information discovers that they have released it to third parties without your permission. The system should be able to go in and drop ballistics like in Operation Desert Fox to destroy every trace of unauthorised usage.

Sci-Fi? Maybe! But what Thomas Power talks about in the above video will become reality and the AI based security system as above is no less Sci-Fi than Facetime from Apple was say 10 years ago.

It is no secret that there are loads of fake social media accounts around the Internet. Accounts set up purporting to be someone who doesn’t actually exist.

In the offline world, fake ID’s and fake personas have existed for centuries. Back in 2005 when I was planning my return to Australia from over 22 years abroad, I recall reading somewhere that Australia had 20% more official ID’s than we had actual population. It is one of the key reasons why the ‘Australia Card’, a form of national identity card various governments have tried to introduce since the late 1970’s, would be a disaster and a complete shambles.

In an environment like social media that makes it so easy to create personas it was always inevitable that fake and fraudulent ID’s would pop up. The ‘Single Sign On’ (SSO) capabilities from services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google that are widespread through the Internet are simply making it easier to propagate the illusion of the person that is created. Single Sign On with one of these networks or service providers can be used for account registration, linking, and accessing other third party services. In other words, create your Facebook, Twitter and/or Gmail (Google+) account and you are well on your way.

Grab your IPhone or Android, take a few happy snaps of random people in public, at the bar, in a cafe or restaurant, and upload them immediately to your feed/stream. Voila, you instantly start to look like a real person. Connect to as many people as you can, choose the first ones carefully and leverage their reputation to build new connections. Easier still automate the extent of your connectedness with various tools and autoresponders that lead people who ‘follow you’ (back) to connect with you on other services.

The reasons for having fake ID’s online are probably as numerous as they are for having them offline. I don’t intend to go into that here. What I have noticed more recently though is the number of new and clearly fake LinkedIn accounts. As an Open Networker I gladly accept incoming connection requests and so receive several new requests daily. That doesn’t mean that I immediately click ‘Accept All’ and nor should you. Creating a fake ID and requesting others connect to that account under the accepted policies of being a member of the Open Networker groups, IMHO violates the intention of those very policies.

There really should be a ‘Fake Profile’ group on all of the social networks (ideally that autofeed data to each other) where fake ID’s can be outed. Problem with that is policing, control, possible defamation/libel suits, and really who has the time unless it is set up as a commercial venture, which is possibly not a bad idea; but again, who has the time?

The more fake social media profiles are created, the greater the noise will become online. Although there is probably more noise (in terms of total volume) on the Internet than ever before, for those who remember the early Usenet and BBS’s prior to that, I feel the relative noise to level ratio is much lower today than it was back then, but it is creeping up fast. Do I have a solution for this? No. For now just be alert!