Daily Magazine

Everyone tries to network, but few people do it well, often making the same basic mistakes.

Here’s what not to do when you’re trying to expand or leverage your network:

1. Try to take before you give. The goal of networking is to connect with people who can help you make a sale, get a referral, establish a contact, etc. When we network, we want something.

But at first, never ask for what you want. In fact you may never ask for what you want. Forget about what you can get and focus on what you can provide. Giving is the only way to establish a real connection and relationship. Focus solely on what you can get out of the connection and you will never make meaningful, mutually beneficial connections.

When you network, it’s all about them, not you...

It’s hard to tell whether it’s a case of correlation or causation, but according to a new study published this week, employees who are super active on social networking sites have a very different idea of what is appropriate workplace behavior than other workers.

For starters, active social networkers — defined in the 2011 National Business Ethics Survey, a study published this week by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center (ERC) as people who spend more than 30 percent of the workday participating on social networking sites — are much more likely to view their current jobs as temporary. 72 percent of active social networkers polled said they plan to change employers within the next five years, compared to 39 percent of non-active social networkers.

Understand social networking websites, how they work and what tools will make them easier to manage, so that you can put social media to work for you and your business.

Helping you to understand social networking so that you can put social media to work for you and your business.

Social network sites are growing popularity every day. Businesses can no longer ignore this social media trend. Instead, we should embrace these opportunities as affordable marketing tools for both online and offline businesses.

Whether your business is large or small, you can make social media work for you. By engaging customers or potential customers through an online presence on a website, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn or YouTube...businesses can spread the word about themselves to their target audiences. 

They can also cultivate a more interactive relationship with their current customer base and have more control over their online reputation...

The following interview is with Dave Gowel, who has been recognized as a “LinkedIn Jedi” by Inc.com and the Boston Globe, is the CEO of RockTech, and author of The Power in a Link: Open Doors, Close Deals and Change the Way you do Business Using LinkedIn (Wiley, December 2011). Gowel co-founded RockTech with Mark Rockefeller to build software tools that help corporations increase productivity through quicker adoption of underutilized technologies. The interview has been edited for clarity.

A lot of people see LinkedIn as a recruiting or job hunting network. What are some of the other ways professionals can put LinkedIn to work, once they’ve landed that dream job?

I think one of the key ways to think about it is really a relationship filter, that when you put in all the relationships that you already have, it allows you to see the ones that you could have more easily, or get information about potential ones...

If you search the best social network for you and your business, here you'll find an amazing list
with few information about the niche that use it. [note Martin Gysler]

This is a list of major active social networking websites and excludes dating websites (see List of online dating websites). For defunct social networking websites, see List of defunct social networking websites.

Please note the list is not exhaustive, and is limited to notable, well-known sites.

Want to create an expansive and powerful network? We asked LinkedIn's power users for their best tips.

The rules of engagement on LinkedIn are fairly clear: first and foremost, you should only connect with people you actually know. Yet millions of people—yes, we're looking at you—are broadening their networks by connecting to people with whom they've never even had a discussion.

The rules aren't black and white, but if you want to expand your LinkedIn database make sure to choose the right shade of grey. "One major pet peeve of mine when it comes to LinkedIn requests is when people who don't know you say you're a 'friend,' or that you have done business with them at their current company," says social media strategist Scott Swanay. "First of all, that's not true, and second of all, it's just lazy on their part—those are generally requests that I'll ignore."...