Buzz around with business social networking

Most business people understand the term “networking”. That is, networking in the form of creating, building, and maintaining relationships that will yield additional contacts and relationships.

The term “social networking” and even “social business networking” is now quite ubiquitous. It helps to add the term “business” to avoid perception as a thinly-veiled date-o-rama.  If you are from the great city of Denver, you’ll know what I mean.

Not to be confused with the ever-popular social network services (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, etc.), social networks are social structures that are typically driven by people or organizations sharing something in common building ties and, technically speaking, “nodes” (the individuals). But we’ll spare the Sociology for now.

There is no denying the value of a strong network. It is not hard to find successful people who will tell you that their success is largely (or entirely) due to connections, or “who they knew”.  The power of social networking skill can not only enrich your life by virtue of just being “out there”, but it can make a huge difference in your professional success.

Enter Integrated Alliances; a Denver, Colorado based social business networking organization. As they characterize it, they are “a business social networking company offering LinkedIn training and other social media training that helps you integrate your on-line networking and your face-to-face "off-line" networking efforts for maximum effect.”

If you are not familiar with LinkedIn, you should be. It felt to me like they came out of nowhere about 5 years ago (they launched in 2002) and have been going like gangbusters ever since. At least ever since I have been paying attention, that is.

Integrated Alliances is careful to be clear that they are not affiliated with LinkedIn. However, they do a bang-up job of providing great resources to really optimize the tool. Through workshops, events, and training programs, they can make a real difference for those who want to understand the power of social business networking. Great job, folks!