Working the electronic grapevine

As usual, the Christian Science Monitor is on top of another interesting cutting-edge development: virtual social networking. Staff writer Stacy A. Teicher reports: “Working the electronic grapevine”; Networking sites are quickly becoming a mainstream way to find jobs and employees

Networking sites are quickly becoming a mainstream way to find jobs or employees, make deals, and meet mentors. Several million people have raced to link up everyone in their little black books on the Internet. . . .

[O]nline networking has come a long way since SixDegrees.com tried it in the mid-1990s and folded a few years later. Now the Internet is faster and offers more sophisticated functions, and the popularity of other online activities has wrought a massive change in attitudes: Buyers and sellers have been connected through eBay, boyfriends and girlfriends through Friendster, and Deaniacs through assorted blogs.

“We have become convinced as a society, reluctantly … that if people can build a close enough relationship to propose marriage without having met face to face … then surely we can build the kind of relationships that allow us to hire someone for a six-figure position,” says Scott Allen, coauthor of the forthcoming book “The Virtual Handshake.”

The concept raises a classic dilemma: quality versus quantity. “With face-to-face networking, you get much greater depth to your relationships, but it takes so much longer, so your circle cannot be as great,” says Steven Rothberg, president of CollegeRecruiter.com in Minneapolis. “My concern is, if each of those hundreds of relationships [created online] aren’t meaningful individually, why would any one of [those people] be inclined to stick their neck out to help you?”

Founders and users of the sites say they supplement face-to-face interactions, revealing new layers of connections. Online introductions are typically followed by in-person meetings . . . .
Once people decide they’re ready to try online networking, they need to think about which of more than a dozen sites would be a good fit. Some are open to anyone.

On Tribe.net, for example, people join online interest groups and post classified ads within them. In December, the job-search giant Monster.com added a networking component, where members can ask to be connected to others they find through detailed searches. Friendster.com is popular among the under-35 crowd and is known as more of a social and dating network, but job recruiters have their eye on it as a potential resource.

Some sites require that you be invited by other members. Google’s multipurpose networking site, Orkut, is so new that many people eager to join are frustrated because they are waiting for someone they know to link them in.

The strictly business sites that work by invitation, such as LinkedIn, appeal to people who would probably be flooded by requests in a more open forum. LinkedIn’s members include many venture capitalists, as well as top executives from companies such as Netscape and Sony Worldwide, says spokesman Konstantin Guericke. . . .

I’ve joined LinkedIn, but have yet to import my contacts, which as I understand it, is essential to gain the full benefit of networking. All of these sites seem to work on the “friend of a friend of a friend” notion, which of course is quite powerful.

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