Randy Weber

John Mariotti posted a guest article on Small Business Trends on Ten Reasons I Won’t Use Social Media Sites. In it he comes off as a stubborn, grumpy old man. Note to John - not everyone gets to spend all their time going from conference to conference shaking hands.

While I’ve founds sites like MySpace and FaceBook to be useless for business networking purposes, Linkedin has proven to be very useful. I’ve gotten many interviews through invitations to link up and through introductions. In my past role at Match.com, I reached multiple leads via Linkedin that I otherwise would not have been able to locate. So my experience is that social networking can be very effective both in finding a job and in finding a lead.

Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb posted “A Guide to Business Development 2.0.” Of course I have a complaint or I wouldn’t be writing this. Alex thinks that “cold calling is dead.” He discusses Linkedin, APIs, and Twitter as alternatives.

Yep, Linkedin is great. APIs are nice if you have them, but biz dev folks aren’t in charge of such things. And outside of the early adopters and tech saavy folks of the Bay Area, not everyone uses Twitter.

Sometimes you have to cold call. No one ever answers their phone, so you’ve got 30 seconds to make your pitch. Most folks get far fewer voicemails than e-mails, so the likelihood that your message will be received is much higher. Even if you’re using Linkedin, you still have to rely on e-mail. In reality I almost always end up calling and e-mailing and that’s what most folks do to me. If their e-mail doesn’t interest me, then I don’t respond. I always return voicemail. If my employers took away the phone, I wouldn’t be able to do my job using nothing but Web 2.0 technology.

Collaboradate.com posted about businesses building themselves up using MySpace. He suggests that “they should continue to phase out competing widgets, or charge companies to have their widgets be compatible with the site.” I’d do this if I were MySpace. So I’ll say it again - be careful when attaching your fortunes to other businesses without some kind of contractual relationship.

Startup Review wrote a great case study on Facebook. The main takeaway for me is that offline behavior drives online usage. Other examples of community sites that fit this bill are Gay.com, BlackPlanet.com, and iVillage, all of which are successful sites that were created to serve an existing community. They were not communities created online from within another site. Looking at sites like Linkedin, which is on it’s own a very successful site and one that I like very much, has tried to create communities from within its site as exempliefied by university and professional affiliations. This has not worked nearly as well external sites serving these same groups. If you’re a mainstream service trying to create niche communities, you would be better served trying to partner with existing sites that serve these niche groups than to try building the community yourself.