Web Worker Daily

With the global economy still moribund, tools and services that help you find leads and extract more value from your existing business contacts can only be welcome.

LinkedIn has become the online resume repository of choice and helps curate an individual’s professional network, but how to actually make use of those relationships isn’t clear. Currently, LinkedIn simply delivers an email or an RSS feed summarizing what your contacts have been doing.

Enter SocialMinder, an interesting service that’s just entered a closed alpha-testing phase. SocialMinder claims to:

• Analyze your email archive, mapping email contacts to your LinkedIn network.
• Identify those contacts searching for new business opportunities and neglected contacts that need attention.
• Provide recent business news from each identified contact to use as a discussion point. Read the rest of this entry »

In the old days of networking, we were told things like 1) bring your business cards with you wherever you go; 2) make notes on the back of the business cards you collect at networking events so you can remember something about the person when you follow up; 3) remember to follow up with people you meet to nurture your network; 4) an easy way to touch base with someone in your network is to clip out an article that you think might interest them and mail it to them.

What’s the 2009 version of networking? How about 1) remember your moo cards and keep your .vcf (vCard file) updated; 2) snap a photo with your iPhone and tag the image, share contact info with Sharecard for iPhone and don’t forget to find and link to them on LinkedIn; 3) use Socialminder to keep tabs on your networking; 4) email a link to an article you read online that you think they might be interested in or better yet, share it via your social network status updates.

What’s Socialminder, you ask? Socialminder is a new Web-based application that is exploring the ins and outs of maintaining a healthy, vibrant and fruitful social network. I found out about Socialminder from several well-connected friends via an email. I immediately joined because they were people who I trust.

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Recently, I was speaking to another web-working type about his company’s name – which I really liked, by the way. The name included “Social” in it. He said he’s been hearing mixed things about the name.

“Someone told me that ’social’ is so over,” he said, lamenting that his company name may already be dated.

Is “Social” already over? That’s news to me. Those immersed in web work may be sick of the (over)use of the word “social,” particularly if, like me, they’ve been working in the social media space back before anyone called it “social.”

Back in 1995, we called it “community” and “communication.” Heck, we all became social online when we first realized we could communicate with others via our computers on traditional phone lines. Out on the speaking circuit, I talked about how the Internet was all about “connection – not just connecting us to information but also connecting us to people, to one another.”  Sure, we didn’t have the powerful sharing tools that we have today and social networks weren’t even a glimmer on the horizon. Does anyone remember Andrew Weinreich’s “failed” online community SixDegrees.com that paved the way for LinkedIn and the like? That was a social media before it was called social media.

So is “Social” just 2008’s buzzword and on its way out?

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