Geert Conard's Blog, page 16

Has networking changed in the last 4 years ?

This week my new book 'Friends with Benefits' was launched onto the virtual shelves of the Ecademy Press webshop and Amazon.co.uk. Next month, 21/11/2009, the official Booklaunch-event will take place in my hometown Diest (B).
Because this new book is launched exactly 4 years after my first book, 'A Girlfriend in Every City', it also shows the change (or not ?) that happened in social networking during this period.
This gave me the idea to pour the complete text of both books into...

Linkedin hits 50 million users today

My very first experiences with online networking were already in early 2004. The very first online network I discovered was LinkedIn, which started up one year earlier in May 2003 as a very formal online directory for business people.In those very early days LinkedIn already had about 20.000 users in Belgium and 1,6 million members worldwide. Among those early adopters I stayed on top of the ranking in Belgium for almost two years.
Today LinkedIn has hit the 50 Million users marker ... 50...

How to launch a book on a shoestring budget (2)

This is a series of blogposts with a view behind the scenes of the booklaunch event for my new book 'Friends with Benefits'.
If you haven't read part 1, you'll find it HERE.
The next step in organizing my event was ordering the necessary props for dressing up the venue. I had the bookcover designed by a professional graphics studio and I asked them to also create a rollup banner, picturing me and my books. This rollup banner wouldn't be just for this event, but can also be used on all the...

How to launch a book on a shoestring budget

I was a complete novice when I launched my first book 'A Girlfriend in Every City' in November 2005. Except from sending a press release to the couple of journalists I knew, I didn't do much to launch the book.
With my first box of 50 books, I went to an Ecademy networking event in Mechelen and sold them to the attendees.
A nice side-effect of launching a book is that people are starting to see you as someone who knows what he's talking about. Almost immediately I was asked to attend events...

Why you should Twitter

Whenever I talk about Twitter to Social Media novices, they never seem to really get the point of why they should be active on Twitter. And answering them the obvious "Because that's where the conversations are taking place" doesn't really seem to hit the spot.This morning, after reading an interesting roundup on Twitter by @LouisGray, it suddenly came to me.The best way to prove to novices that this thing is not going to go away, that it's definitely here to stay ... is the fact that it...

Customer/Supplier Relationships

One of the results of the financial crisis is the fact that some people are making the move from being employees to becoming suppliers. In times when jobs are hard to find some people take the leap to self employment, follow their dreams and start their own business.

For those people it's often also the first time they are facing customer/supplier relationships, which sometimes can be a shock.
Customers and suppliers usually have different interests and each of them is trying to get the most...

Writing a book

As you probably have picked up from my earlier posts, on Nov. 21 I'm launching a new book 'Friends with Benefits'. This is my second book on Social Media and a follow-up on my first book 'A Girlfriend in Every City', published exactly 4 years ago. On both occasions I have made the choice to work with Ecademy Press as my publisher, based in Cornwall, UK.
I often get questions about this choice to work with a publisher which is based in another country, so I'll try to explain a bit more about t...

The value of networking is to get top of mind

I'm almost finished reading Penny Power's new book "Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me". Yesterday evening I read this quote about a question Penny was struggling with in preparation for a conference in Bali in 2005 : "How do you measure the value in your network ?"

This was Penny's answer : "Your network value is based on what people say about you when you are not there". Indeed, networking is about being talked about when you are not in the room. That sentence really sums it all up, doesn't it ...

The Health club story

Since the launch of my first book in Nov. 2005, people often book me as a speaker for their event. I love talking about social networking and social media and I have experienced that people like it most when I add lots of little stories to my presentation.

Already some time ago I was thinking about creating a story on the fact that just 'being a member' of a networking group won't do much for your business. That's when I thought of the similar experience you could have joining a health club. ...

The future is niche

Now social networks like Facebook have reached the stage where almost everyone you know is on it, the next big thing will be niche networks. In my opinion this is an emerging trend which will lead to an incredible amount of very successful but smaller networking websites, each of them serving a very specific niche audience. Some of them are already around for some time, but indicators show their time has come to shine.
These "themed" networks will cater the needs of very specific groups of...