The Samaritan-Web Project

Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise

"Experience has shown that simply installing a wiki or blog (referred to collectively as 'social software') and making it available to users is not enough to encourage widespread adoption. Instead, active steps need to be taken to both foster use amongst key members of the community and to provide easily accessible support."

Following a link from one of my favorite sources for news on all things collaboration, Virtual Projects, I came across the latest news from Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, on the use of SocialText as the enterprise wiki platform at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) to replace their intranet platform.

Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively are explored in depth.

"We had to move away from a static, dead intranet," says Myrto Lazopoulou. "The wiki has allowed us to improve collaboration, communication and publication. We can cross time zones, improve the way teams works, reduce email and increase transparency."

A case study on DrKW is available in PDF here.

At the bottom of the case study is a link to a great article by Ross Mayfield, entitled "An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise" which is a great analysis of the business drivers for making the jump from static intranet to a more dynamic user environment.

CodePlex

I've been head down these past few weeks working on a customer deployment and on some internal business planning deliverables, and finally logged into NewsGator to catch up on some reading. I came across Lawrence Liu's post about adding a SharePoint Community Kit (SCK) to CodePlex, the just-launched Microsoft community development website. For those of you working in the Microsoft technology realm, a description from the CodePlex homepage:

Welcome to CodePlex, Microsoft's community development Web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback.

I had heard about CodePlex a couple weeks back from Joel or someone over in the SharePoint technical marketing space, and, to reinforce Lawrence's point, am excited to see the content growing around SharePoint.

Having participated in a similar community a few years back when my own company developed add-ons for the Rational development tool suite (my company developed tools for Rose and ClearCase - which led to books on ClearCase and ClearQuest), I am excited to see this kind of resource for MS developers. After watching much of this effort with Rational die off over the last few years due to a shift in product architecture and then the acquisition by IBM (I'm not bitter), I'm glad its something MS values and wants to expand.

Love that it works with VSTS. Love the news feeds capability that captures blogs from project participants and posts it to the community, and that you can subscribe to any of the content within the site. Very cool.

How MySpace Is Beating Friendster

I came across a link to a great whitepaper explaining how MySpace has grown faster and overcome the pace of Friendster. You can find it on The Virtual Handshake, a blog by Scott Allen and David Teten that anyone interested in social networking should read (in addition to their book): 

Last year, our ex-employee A.J. Al-Fayez introduced me to two current Harvard MBA students, Matthew Chun and David Morland. Matthew and David are both former engineers and management consultants, with an interest in internet and technology businesses. As a part of John Wells’ class entitled “Strategic Agility: Competing On The Edge,” they wrote a strategic analysis of social networking companies, with a focus on why MySpace overtook Friendster. This article is must-reading for anyone interested in building a successful online community, but particularly the folks at MySpace. It’s very easy to lose buzz and excitement in an online community, just as today’s hot bar can be tomorrow’s hangout for geeks. MySpace has no guarantee that it will retain its current audience in the future, something Friendster knows all too well.

You can find the whitepaper here.

About Squidoo

Yes, yes - its been a while since I've added to this site. My focus has been....elsewhere. But I have been adding to the ever-expanding world wide web as of late through Squidoo.

For those unfamiliar with Squidoo, think of it as About.com done right. Created by marketing guru Seth Godin, with the help of folks like Heath Row, an editor at Fast Company, the site provides slick tools and a simple interface for people to demonstrate their expertise in anything and everything. Here's how Seth describes the site:

Squidoo lets anyone build a simple, free web page that points to blogs, online stores, maps and other information on a single topic—any topic. Each page can contain insight, bullet points, links, products and pictures, and each page earns royalties for its creator or for charity.

Squidoo leverages the power of personal recommendation. The site will eventually host millions of handmade ‘lenses’, each a focused, useful guide to some area of expertise, some glimpse of the net. Instead of aimlessly poking, a lens lets a user see the big picture—a human being’s big picture, the overview you need to get the meaning of the idea.

The heart of Squidoo is the lens. A lens can point the best hotels in London. Or blogs with pictures and articles about Paris Hilton. Or personal accounts about Hurricane Katrina.

A lens can expose a cross-section of the web, a more personal and more humanly relevant take that no computer could ever create. A lens is an easy-to-build page of links and referrals. Two lenses may be on the same topic, but they are never the same — every lens is personal, and every lens is built by a person, a Lensmaster.

I participated in the beta program, and have now created a couple dozen lenses. My personal page is here, and my fake Seth Godin lens is here. One of the most popular lenses is Chris Anderson's (editor in chief of Wired magazine) lens 'The Long Tail' (to which I am creating a spoof lens called 'The Long Tale'). I've also created lenses for some of my favorite music artists, such as Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and Duran Duran.

Squidoo is a fantastic idea - one that I am convinced will expand and become popular very quickly. I'm waiting for the pages to start permeating the search engines. But the real change that sites like this are doing is cleaning up the glut of useless content out on the web - content that is irrelevant, unconnected, and static - replacing it with real content and real content owners. Therin lies the real value - ownership and accountability for what's up on the web. I'm sold.

Microsoft Aero

From Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch:

Microsoft has moved 10 of its social-computing experts from Microsoft Research onto its Windows user interface team. Will the 'Aero' interface be more interactive, as a result?

Social-networking technologies, including blogs, Wikis, and RSS, are likely to play a key part in the Longhorn "Aero" interface, based on a recent reorganization made by the Redmond software developer.

The social-computing group has been working with the Windows team for several years on prototyping future user-experience projects. The social-computing team included a mix of designers, developers and social psychologists focused on developing a better understanding of the individual and better ways of communicating and sharing.

What makes a good Social Networking app?

Saw this post on Bill Ives' blog and thought I'd reprint it:

Cesar Brea was one of the panel participants at the January New England KM Cluster. His panel covered the role of technology in social networking. Cesar is the former head of Contact Network Corporation, an enterprise social networking software startup and now is a consultant and on the Executive Board of .LRN, an open source learning platform that includes blogs. I asked him to summarize what makes good technology for social networking applications. He replied with a good summary which is repeated in a recent post on his blog. I want to provide the main points below but also encourage you to go to his blog as Cesar has some nice long essays on industry issues. He is also a case in our blog book.

To answer this, Cesar said the logical thing is to ask first, "What makes a good social networking application?"

”In summary, you have to have something valuable to exchange, and not lose it in a thicket of other junk. Second, you have to group users into tight "affinity groups" within which they are likely to share. Finally, third, you have to make both contributing and consuming information really easy.”

So then you ask yourself the following questions about technology:

1. at what cost can I modify it to focus the feature set only on the one or two things that are most valuable to exchange?

2. does its scheme for defining and managing groups and permissions support the affinity group structure I think will maximize sharing?

3. at what cost can I modify it to support the simplest possible structured contribution and consumption of what's shared?

Generally speaking, the first and third of these are easy if you're custom-building a web app. Any good package should also make them easy.

The second is hard. The right way to do it is with abstractions that support inheritance of group properties and permissions. But abstractions can be seriously slow if not done well. (Getting this right is part of what makes OpenACS/.LRN really special.)”

Plaxo Reconsidered

I came across an interesting post by Judith Meskill over on The Social Software Weblog about Plaxo that I thought was worth sharing. She includes a link to an article by David Coursey over at eWeek outlining his reasons for initially jumping onto the "I hate Plaxo" bandwagon, and his recent reversal.

While I've gone back and forth with a Plaxo representative about my previous posting, I'm still standing firm in my dislike for this tool. Until I too have a clear picture of the future Plaxo product roadmap, I'll remain skeptical. I'm just not a fan of the unsolicited emails.

About Plaxo

What is Plaxo?

Plaxo is a third party software program that integrates with a computer's mail client, such as Outlook, to collect, store, and update contact information. Most information in your Outlook Contacts list is transferred to Plaxo when you use their services. I heard about Plaxo the same way many of you heard about it - by receiving a contact update request from a friend who had added my name to his contact list. Aside from its intrusive nature, I would question the long-term model of any company like this.

I view Plaxo as nothing more than a contact-digging expedition for future products/services.

Ok, first off, you should ALWAYS protect your contact information to prevent unauthorized disclosure. Due to the number of Data Privacy and Information Security risks associated with this service and other third party services of this type, use of Plaxo and similar services is strongly cautioned.

Privacy Concerns:

* Since you don't have any contractual agreements with Plaxo regarding information sharing, Plaxo has not agreed to protect such information. Using Plaxo software potentially discloses confidential information about you, your friends, and your business contacts without your explicit consent.

* Contact information shared with Plaxo may include confidential information such as home addresses, home phone numbers, and mobile/cell phone numbers.

* Use of Plaxo on can place your PC at risk to malicious code in Internet and email viruses and worms.

* Because Plaxo can send messages on behalf of its members, some recipients may incorrectly believe those messages came from you.

What do I need to do?

If you are currently using Plaxo or a similar third party service to manage your contact information, discontinue use immediately as follows: Email remove@plaxo.com to inform Plaxo support that you wish to end your service.

About Spoke Team Edition

Users of the Spoke Personal Edition were sent an email blast from Spoke Chairman, Ben T. Smith, outlining features of the Spoke Team Edition and Enterprise Edition, now with Salesforce.com sforce-certification:

Selling is hard, especially in today's environment. The last thing a sales professional needs is complex new software or process. Spoke appreciates this, and we have designed Spoke Team Edition to help you do the things you already do better and faster, and give your company the winning advantage.

Have you just been assigned a new account? When you view that opportunity in your SFA system, Spoke automatically shows you who you know at that account, a list of possible sales targets, and relationships you can leverage to get an introduction - all within the same browser window. Why cold call when you can use Spoke to discover key insights about the opportunity and gain a warm introduction to your prospect?

Spoke makes it easy to use your extended relationship network in all of your accounts without any data entry. With seamless SFA integration you can see where others in your company have relationships to move all of your deals to the next level.

Importantly, as your sales activities progress, Spoke delivers updates and new information right to your Inbox. Has a colleague developed a new relationship at a target company? Spoke emails you so that you can collaborate and coordinate.

Need to build a relationship with a technical buyer at an account? Spoke lets you use your company's network to identify the buying team, find a coach, learn the buying process, uncover key decision makers, develop your solution and get to the executives whose signatures you need to close the deal. With Spoke you always have the relationship advantage over your competition.

Even if your company is small or you are breaking into a brand new area, Spoke Team Edition lets you use your extended network of partners, former co-workers and friends to get the information you need quickly and simply.

Spoke Team Edition presents different paths of introduction that traverse your workgroup, your trusted partners, and/or the central Spoke Network. And, Spoke Team edition offers all of Spoke's industry-defining options for privacy and information control.

Social Networking Tools Take Aim at Enterprise Sales

I previously mentioned my lackluster response to a conference held last month on enterprise application of some of the social networking solutions, and questioned whether any of these companies had a valid model for moving into the enterprise. Upon further investigation, I'd like to amend my comments.

In a more recent eWeek article (not yet online), Shelly Solheim delves deeper into some of the efforts being explored by Visible Path and ZeroDegrees. While I stand by my statement that as standalone offerings, they are just not viable in the enterprise, it is clear the folks at both companies agree.

Visible Path's software mines employee email and instant messaging accounts, calendars, and address books for contacts and analyzes and maps the networks of relationships. The goal: to help enterprise salespeople tap into their colleagues' connections.

Visible Path weighs the strength of the connection, and if there are multiple connections, suggests the strongest one.

The system can identify which employees have provided connections in the past that have resulted in closed deals.

Visible Path offers integration with standard applications such as Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook and IBM's Lotus Notes, as well as CRM (customer relationship mangement) systems, and partners with salesforce automation vendor Salesforce.com.

Social networking concepts may be the missing link for CRM and KM solutions.

ZeroDegrees, which this month was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, offers a hosted service where users can create their own business networks.

ZeroDegrees offers integration with Outlook, and its software can scan a user's Outlook account and make recommendations about which users should be added to the network.

VP of Product Development Mark Jeffrey acknowledged that there may be a limit to using social networking technologies for business.

My point exactly

Although few attendees of the social networking event disputed the usefulness of social networking, some questioned how these companies will bring in revenues.

Yes. Exactly. But again, in conjunction with other technologies, there is huge potential. The convergence is happening.

Enterprise Application?

A panel of experts, including Antony Bryden, president of startup Visible Path Corp., Mark Jeffrey, vice president of ZeroDegrees Inc., and Adrian Scott, ceo of Ryze Ltd., gathered in New York this week to talk about the importance of social networks in the enterprise.

"Although few attendees at the social-networking event disputed the usefulness of social networking, some questioned how these companies will bring in revenues. "

While Ryze currently and ZeroDegrees has plans to charge user subscription fees, "Visible Path plans to offer its software as a service, charging companies platform-licensing fees that start at $20,000 per year and scale up depending on the number of seats."

Seems that the question of enterprise application of this technology has gone unanswered once again. The underlying opinion is that the current group offering SN solutions is destined to remain as stand-alone, user-based systems. The company that can provide legitimate integration into corporate systems and business processes has yet to step forward.

About ICQ Universe

AOL enters the SN fray with ICQ Universe, as captured by The Social Software Weblog. My thoughts? Anything AOL creates, run away. But its basically just another friendship-based SN, and probably fits right in to their service lineup. It'll be interesting to see how they promote it.

About Orkut

OK, I've neglected adding info on this site for a while. Was invited to Orkut a month or so ago, built my profile, and don't use it that much. Orkut is in beta, and is the product or the folks at Google. The site is purely personal networking (friends) and the layout and capabilities are fairly basic. Probably the most useful function is the ability to click on your network and see the images of each of your friends, and by clicking on their image, you can then see everyone in their network (including yourself). You can keep clicking down through profile after profile.

Personally, I don't find any value in this capability. You have no idea how subsequent selections are related to others in your network, or in how any of these people might be useful to add to your network. However, as with most purely social networking sites (non-business), you have the freedom to approach anyone about anything, and stike up a conversation whenever.

As far as categories, members have the ability to start any number of groups, and subscribe to any group. Most groups have many members, but not much conversation happening. That's probably because there is so much overlap between groups, and no real way to tie them together. So instead of searching for a specific topic, its clear people are just creating a new topic. Orkut is Google's obvious attempt to jump on the SN bandwagon, but overall there is not much there.

About Friendster

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

Friendster is a free-for-all. You have the ability to freely search among its 3 million members, although you can only make contact with "friends" (that is, along a chain of contacts, which can extend many degrees away). Even though it's not business-oriented, you should still sign up. Just like going to a real life social event, you don't know where your friends will take you in your business or career...

Friendster's best for cultivating after-work relationships, dating, and finding groups for social activities. Some singles believe dates referred by "friends" are more palatable than the quasi-anonymous hook-ups arranged by a true "dating service" like Match.com. Not that there's anything wrong with Match.com. Most singles have no qualms using it to find dates. The taboo has long since lifted. However, some have remarked on the "creepy factor," where "people pretend to be someone they're not." However, that happens on the phone too…

Nonetheless, you should know about "Friendster Fraudsters," people pretending to be someone they're not. In an open system like Friendster, there can be random craziness, but still it's difficult to pretend to be a member of a social network for personal gain. There *is* vigilante justice, as some have discovered. (In LinkedIn, by contrast, it's impossible to blast out messages to people. Because of the contact chain, a third party must vouch for you, and therefore confirm you are who you say you are.) Spoofing and other disruptive behavior is sure to diminish when the services start charging. It's one thing to sign up anonymously to a free site, and another to cough up a credit card number. The money people behind all Friendster have little doubt you'll do that once you discover the good things about it down the line. Super-heavyweights Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital have already invested $10 million in Friendster. Tim Koogle (co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo) is on the board and invested $1 million in personal funds.

About ItsNotWhatYouKnow

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

ItsNotWhatYouKnow, or INWYK (pronounced "In-Week") for short, is listed here for completeness, although it's not yet on my A-list. My sense is that INWYK has promise but needs to attain a larger membership base before it's considered in the same peer group as Ryze or LinkedIn. Still, it has a good feature set and an attractive interface. Some cool features are a world map, graphically displaying where your contacts are concentrated, and other visual ways of scanning your personal network. It's important to realize that all of the services mentioned in this article are rapidly evolving and adding new features. Frankly, it's impossible to know which one will come out on top. I'm hedging my bets by semi-passively signing up for the likely candidates. I'll continue to watch what develops and allocate my time and attention accordingly. I believe these new services will become "mission critical" for business quite soon, and recommend being in at an early stage to take full advantage.

About ZeroDegrees

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

A relative newcomer among newcomers, ZeroDegrees shows promise. It has a nice Outlook plug-in that makes searching for new contacts easy and natural. As with LinkedIn, ZeroDegrees requires both parties to explicitly opt-in before a contact is made or passed along. I haven't been able to evaluate it, but ZeroDegrees claims an "engine" that is one generation more advanced than its competitors. That could be an advantage, since some services seem to get somewhat laggy at certain busy times (especially Friendster). ZeroDegrees can also import contacts from Eudora, Goldmine, ACT!, Outlook Express, and Yahoo. That's a big plus for non-Outlook people.

ZeroDegrees' software not only scans through your contact manager program to create a list of contacts, but also recommends which contacts should be invited into the network. You can then select your network and sort contacts into three categories of familiarity. People in the "Inner Circle," (the highest level), can access full contact information of everyone in each other's networks, bypassing the intermediary. Outside of the Inner Circle, users must request an introduction through the originator of the contact, and that gatekeeper's identity is kept secret. Jaz Dhillon, the president of ZeroDegrees explains the rationale: "Our connectors are senior business people who value relationships much more than people who just want to get introductions"

I may or may not invite you to join ZeroDegrees. On one hand, there's no current cost or any obligation to join, and you should explore as many services as you can. However if you're only going to join one or two, I'd recommend going with the leaders LinkedIn and/or Ryze right now.

About Spoke

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

$9.2M in venture capital has poured into Spoke recently. Why would top-tier VC firms like US Venture Partners and Sierra Ventures invest in Spoke when LinkedIn seems to be further along? Spoke goes deeper and wider than other programs in helping to build a contact database. In addition to scanning your address book, Spoke mines your email flow to compile a list of contacts. It also scours the web and other sources of public data for connections. It'll also search beyond the "customary" four degrees of separation. It claims over 5 million people in that extended network (although far fewer actual users of course).

Spoke also has a different target market. They primarily sell into mid-size and larger firms, providing an in-house program to foster contact sharing among employees. At up to $75,000, this installation isn't cheap, but for high transaction value sales, it can easily pay for itself. That's what the VC's believe will deliver a 10x return on their investment. Unlike its main corporate-target competitor, Visible Path, Spoke also provides no-charge access to individuals and small businesses who wish to use it like LinkedIn. This is very smart in my opinion. They expand their greater network, adding value and variety for their corporate customers while offering a high-quality service at no cost to those unlikely to pay for it anyway. As an aside, Visible Path is an enterprise-only solution geared to sales teams, and is therefore not reviewed here.

If you take the time to visit the Spoke.com web site, you'll immediately see that the service is well capitalized and professional. It is the third service I highly recommend you join. While both Spoke and Visible Path extract contact info from your address book, Spoke takes an additional step and also mines individual email messages for additional contact info and to assign relationship strength. That's a very interesting feature. Spoke provides a no-charge download of an Outlook plug-in that automatically synchs your local contact database with the private one you build on their server. Based on the frequency and recency and type of your contacts with others, Spoke estimates the strength of your relationship. It's quite interesting to let it do this (I'm comfortable enough with their privacy policy to permit it), and then view a ranking of your contacts, from strongest to weakest. Spoke showed me that I have 3,600 first-degree contacts, although I consider about a thousand of these to be "junk," mostly mined from my emails, or listing people I don't consider having a relationship with. Still, I was pretty surprised at the size of my Spoke network, right out of the gate.

There's unique feature in Spoke that I hope other services copy soon: the ability to include a list of all your different email addresses, having each one contribute to building your contact universe, yet keeping them all confidential. This is important to us who use different email addresses for different purposes. Most people have a personal AOL-type email account in addition to a work email, at a minimum. To fight spam, more and more people are starting to use "disposable" email addresses*. Most Urbach Letter subscribers know me as victor@urbachletter.com. If that's how you look for me on most networking services, you won't find me. For example, on LinkedIn, my email address is linkedin@xemaps.com (xemaps is spamex spelled backwards). However, Spoke is smart enough to know that victor@urbachletter.com should refer to my sign-up address on that service: spoke@xemaps.com. You don't have to set up "disposable" email addresses as I have, but having done so already, I can tell you with some degree of confidence that you won't receive unsolicited commercial email from any of the services mentioned in this letter. To help you keep things straight, I've provided a printable checklist in the yellow sidebar to the right, showing you, step-by-step, how to sign up for the various services and how link to me on each.

About Ryze

My favorite of the social networking bunch. In fact, here is my page.

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

Ryze is the second service I highly recommend you join. It's a very full-featured service that combines the best of online and in-person networking. It's more "open" than Linked-in, yet still has good privacy controls. It attracts a good range of professionals and businesspeople. Ryze facilitates live networking events. The next one in New York City already has 250 RSVP's, with "profiles" listed for the attendees. You can click on names, and pre-select those whom you want to speak with at the event, or easily follow-up afterward. There are also threaded discussion lists, web links, forums, classifieds, and more. Because of these features, and its general approachability, the service is growing quickly, with about 60,000 members as of January 2004. However, Ryze confines your entire contact circle to 2nd degree people (friends of friends), which could be limiting; but that raises an issue that Ryze helps address.

Regardless of which service you join, building a large, vibrant, quality personal network is imperative, whether it's for seeking a new opportunity or becoming more successful in your current job or business. But how do you grow your network? The best way is to join the network of someone who is already very well connected. These folks are known as "hubs," and if you're invited to join them, you'll gain access to a large group of new 2nd degree contacts. (More on this later.) However, you can't sit around and wait for invitations to trickle in. You need to be proactive, inviting your friends, associates, and valued contacts to sign up for the service and join your network. Human nature being what it is (lazy), this can be a challenge. Most people happily take the "do nothing" option. It could take some gentle reminders on your part.

Fortunately, you have other ways to make new connections. Services like Ryze allow you to search for people in your industry or your local area. If you have time to contribute, Ryze has industry and city-specific bulletin boards where you can post and make contacts. You also have control over how accessible you make yourself to others. On Ryze, you can choose from three levels of accessibility. If you set it to a high level of privacy, you won't receive many invitations from "strangers." If you lower it, you'll build your network faster. It's a personal choice.

You should know, however, that Ryze has a paid membership level in addition to a basic membership. None of the other networking sites currently charge fees, but most are planning to in the near future. $10 seems to be the magic number. Whether it's a monthly access charge (what Ryze charges for premium service), or on a per-successful-introduction basis.

Ryze is still usable on the basic level, especially for learning about live networking events, although searching for new contacts is quite limited unless you pay.

Another good article that outlines the benefits of Ryze can be read here

About LinkedIn

I am planning to catalog the major tools and social networks available to the masses, and today I begin with LinkedIn, a service that I use myself...

Taken from The Urbach Letter:

Considered by many to be the premier business networking service, LinkedIn has about 50,000 current members as of this writing. In November, it received a $4.7 million investment from Sequoia Capital (the venture capital firm behind Google, Yahoo, and PayPal). What do they expect to get for their money? There's great expectation that LinkedIn will become an essential part of the upper-echelon business culture. The service is geared to C-level executives, investors, influential managers, and other hard-to-reach people concerned about building contacts with others while tightly controlling access to themselves. LinkedIn exists solely as a service for people who want to receive "warm" introductions to other people. There are no discussion forums, event listings, or the extra content you'll find in other services. But it has an excellent access system. The names and profiles of other people up to four degrees of separation away are visible to you, but you can't get contact information unless it's explicitly given to you by the target person. Before it even reaches your target, every link in the chain must approve your introductory request. Like a firing squad, where each gunman aims at the victim's heart, but one gun contains a blank round, this system allows a person in the contact chain to break it anonymously, with a relatively clear conscience.

This strictly enforced chain of trust ensures that when connections are made, they're well-placed. The anonymous black ball turn-downs prevent "dilution" of the list by reducing the tendency to admit marginal players. However, it also means you won't necessarily grow your network as quickly as you can elsewhere. You'll need to receive an invitation, or be proactive in getting your top-shelf offline contacts to sign up. There's a bit of a Catch 22 here. To build a network, it helps if you've already got one to share. Again, human nature at work. If you want to get, you've got to give. Both parties must believe there's something to gain.

LinkedIn allows you to upload your address book (Outlook and others) to check which of your existing contacts are already on the service. It also facilitates emailing your non-member contacts invitations to join the service. Both of these features are important for jumpstarting your network.

By the way, LinkedIn has become a preferred source for journalists to make contacts with people who are authoritative and trustworthy.