Linda Parkinson-Hardman

Are you ready to take your LinkedIn connections to a new level?

September 14, 2012

We all do it; we add connections to our LinkedIn account without thinking. Sometime later we may find ourselves wondering why we connected with some of the people we have on our lists; we don’t know them, in some cases have never met them and have probably not a ‘conversation’ beyond the initial ‘I’d like to add you to my professional network’. But, at the time it obviously seemed like a good idea to add Joe Bloggs or Jane Doe, and we may well have had a great reason for either asking them to connect with us or accepting the [...]

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Four quick tips to take your off-line networking skills on-line

July 5, 2012

How many times has someone said to you “social networking, it’s not for me” and when you ask them why they say something like “I don’t have time” or “I don’t want to hear about people having coffee all day long”. Often, this sort of reply can be a mask for “I don’t know what to do or why I’d do it”. After all, it can be quite overwhelming to have status updates, news about discussions in groups or tweets coming at you if you aren’t prepared. And yet the reality is that it’s quite simple to get involved in [...]

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‘Sorry, Who Are You’? Making the Most of Your Online Profile

May 2, 2012

How many people have you ever seen at a networking event with a paper bag on their head? It’s not many I’ll bet. After all, the purpose of networking is to meet people and no-one feels comfortable if they can’t see your eyes and face, hear your voice or shake your hand. We learn a lot through all of our senses often without realising it. The way someone speaks or looks may be important to us and a simple handshake can give us a good idea about whether we want to get to know them better. Once we have this [...]

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Making Sense of Twitter with Lists

February 29, 2012

Twitter is a fabulous place to keep up to date on all that is new and happening on the Social Web.  It is also one of the most of the most feared online networks by the average ‘networker’.  This is probably because it looks overwhelmingly ‘busy’ all the time, and it seems difficult to make sense of.  All those tweets coming at you from the people you follow make it difficult to filter out what you want to ‘hear’ from the rest.

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The importance of the introduction in online social networking

January 2, 2012

Have you ever been to a face to face networking event where everyone was silent, where no-one spoke to you and you didn’t speak to them; where you didn’t even exchange a ‘hello’ and a ‘what brings you here?’ conversation.  I haven’t and I suspect that if you did, you’d be disillusioned with the networking scene pretty quickly.  After all the whole point of business networking is to meet and talk to people so you can find those you would like to build strong working relationships with, isn’t it?

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