February 19, 2008
by Satya Adhar

It was a bright sunny morning of 1997, when a computer savvy friend of mine introduced me to hotmail. To have an e-mail ID and not being able to open it or not knowing how to send an attachment was a strange feeling. Since then I have never looked back.

Now, I have 8 e-mail IDs in different domains, 5 social networking profiles, 2 business networking profiles, 2 blogging accounts and a second life. All this fails to keep me interested and engaged, so I keep switching from one site to the other and by the time I am through with the contents of all the accounts put together (which includes deleting the junk mails), it's already lunch time. I become serious and focus on something specific as a target for the day and start googling. Google is so capable that it gives me the thing I wanted together with hundreds of unrelated but interesting things and being an explorer of truth, I get carried away again.

What you read just now was a day in a netbuff's life - welcome to the virtual world!

There is no denying the fact that the internet has significantly changed our lives. Something as simple as E-mail has brought the world so much closer. Then there are these social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook etc where you can create a "virtual you" and interact with people you would have otherwise never met. You also get in touch with people whom you had known but lost touch with. In other words, we are "networking" with people.

Whether social or business, networking is the need of the hour. We need to adapt to the ways and means to network with people in the virtual world too. Imagine an engineer in Bangkok, gets a job offer from Detroit which was never advertised in conventional media. This is the power of virtual networking. Sooner or later, everyone has to adapt to the ways of this world. Based on my experience, I'd recommend a few things which would be aimed towards enhancing your virtual presence either for better job prospects or for business networking. As for social networking, if you are on orkut and facebook, it should be fine. Of late, bigadda has become a popular hangout for Indians.

Let us have a look at www.linkedin.com . It says "Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have. Forget exchanging business cards with acquaintances that don’t know your work, or trying to renew professional ties when you need a favor."

To begin with, you need to register yourself and complete your profile. You will then be prompted to do lot many things like searching your colleagues and batch mates, getting recommended, searching jobs or posting them etc. In a nutshell, "linkedin" is virtual business networking made easy. Spend sometime on it and you will be rewarded. It is highly recommended for all business and technology professionals. Note that All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees. After you are through with the basics, check out Guy Kawasaki's Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: I am no expert - just another internet user. Shall appreciate more comments from gyani people out there. Also feel free to discuss any problems which you may encounter.

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