Windows on the Web:  Online Networking Options

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

NABE is a valuable networking tool. With our meetings, teleconferences, mailings, and publications, you can make lots of connections with other people who use economics in their work. However, there also comes a time when you have to do some connecting with people who aren’t part of “the few, the proud, the Nabesters.” That means you may want to use a social networking site.

What Not To Use

If you are a younger NABE member, you probably already know about My Space and Facebook. (If you are an older NABE member, one of your kids can probably tell you about them.) While these sites may be great for keeping up with old friends or finding out about new musical groups, they may not be the best places for polishing your professional image.

A little over a year ago, just to see what the fuss was about and to take advantage of a “free ad” pointing towards my company website as well as some client sites, I set up a MySpace page. Who knows, maybe there is a subset of MySpace users who really wanted to talk about economics?

Well, to keep this part short, no, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of audience at MySpace for economics. In fact, about the only friend invitations I seem to get are from young ladies who want me to come to their site and see their pictures, which I’m pretty sure aren’t pictures of demand and supply curves.

I have even less knowledge of Facebook. Maybe the most traumatic day in a child’s life is when they find out the truth about Santa Claus. Coming a close second is when a child stumbles upon a parent’s Facebook page; it certainly seems too youth-oriented to be used for professional development.

Better Possibilities: LinkedIn

A much better site for networking is LinkedIn. It is a website that allows you to build a network of connections, and also to connect with their connections, and so on.  Once you build a network of contacts, you can use it to get referrals for clients, search for jobs, hire job candidates, or ask questions.

You can join LinkedIn for free. One of the first things to do is create a profile, essentially your resume and the way you present yourself to other LinkedIn users. After that, you can either search LinkedIn for people you already know or invite nonmembers to join. LinkedIn will also suggest contacts, matching your present or past employers or schools with those of other members. In addition to making contacts, LinkedIn can be used for employment advertising, services, and questions. You can also set your preferences in LinkedIn to show how much or how little of your information to display to others.

I'm not the most aggressive networker—I only have 31 contacts (many of them NABE members). Many of my contacts are more aggressive, for my second-degree network (contacts of my contacts) is up to over 1,800; the third degree network is up to 214,000, making this sort of a “Six Degrees of Separation” game. If you are a member of LinkedIn, send me an invitation and we can expand the NABE connections on the site.

The basic membership in LinkedIn is free, although there are paid memberships that allow you to do more. Other parts of LinkedIn are ad-supported.

Ning

Sometimes you may want to set up a social network of your own. Maybe you want a site to support a local chapter with a calendar, discussion forum, or other social networking tools. Ning allows you to set up a social network without knowing programming or Web design, or even paying rent on a website. After opening an account on Ning, you can set up your own networks and then invite people to join. It may be an ideal tool for NABE chapters that want an electronic home.

These are just a few examples of social networking sites. There is a rapidly expanding list of them on Wikipedia that you can explore.

And Finally....

If you need either a dictionary or thesaurus while you are online, you may want to check out Visuwords. It's an online dictionary based on Princeton University's WordNet, which is an opensource database of definitions and relationships between words. It's difficult to describe, so just visit, type in a word and see what blooms.