Thursday, October 11, 2007

Networking Advice

Whilst by no means an accomplished networker, it's something that I'm working on. I'm not talking about laying cables between computers on a network, but on increasing the group of people I interact with for business and technology information.

Shannon Clark has a post on using business cards effectively that I am going to adopt. For some reason I have never thought to actually write on a business card.

The key piece for me is Tip #6, converting cards from paper to digital as quickly as you can. How many of you have kept every business card you've ever received in one of those little folders expressly bought for that purpose?

I think in all my years of attending various seminars, conferences and training events, I have never seen people transferring business card information via infrared or Bluetooth between digital devices. Infrared is just too fiddly in having to line up the ports just so, and choosing a specific device to transfer to via bluetooth would be so difficult in a room full of enabled devices (add to that the risk of bluejacking). Compare that to the immediate and timely ability to palm a business card across and you can understand why it still reigns supreme.

1 comment:

Stephen Witherden said...

I have a business card holder chock full of business cards and I have used them from time to time to contact people when I needed to. Most of my friends are professionals so I have their business cards too.

If you want to do some networking, join linkedin. I'm on there :)