The Growing Trend in Business NetworkingWritten by Andrea Pellettiere
A Review of "The Five Keys To Building Business Relationships Online" If you are a practitioner of business networking, you know that you can only connect with so many people at each event. But, what if you had opportunity to connect with 20 new potential clients every day? How about 50 or even 100? With proliferation of online portals such as Ryze, Ecademy and Linked In, you now have ability to link with more potential clients than you ever dreamed! In their e-book, "The Five Keys to Building Relationships Online", David Teten, Donna Fisher and Scott Allen explore massive business building potential of online communities and networks. All three authors are prominent and sought after speakers who have achieved notable success in online environment. David Teten is a CEO for an independent research firm called Nitron Advisors and regularly speaks before audiences at Yale, Wharton and Columbia Business School. Donna Fisher is a certified speaking professional and author of highly popular "Networking For Dummies". Scott Allen is regarded as leading expert on building quality relationships online and is entrepreneur's guide on about.com, a website featuring numerous interest based forums. To fully benefit from "Five Keys", you must have at least a nominal understanding of internet technology. There is little to no technical advice regarding how to create and maintain a website, configure appearance of a blog or any of other activities suggested for creating a strong online presence. However, if you have even slightest bit of tech savvy and a basic understanding of building business relationships, you can use this publication to create a self perpetuating business machine. The "Five Keys to Building Relationships Online" focuses on applying principles of face-to-face networking to online environment. The authors detail benefits of participating in many online formats available to you such as communities of purpose (centered around a specific agenda or goal), communities of practice (centered around shared professional interests) and online platforms such as Ryze and Ecademy, where you can create your own community based on any interest you wish. What I valued most about this book, was step-by-step explanation about how to transmute offline-networking skills to create and leverage my online network to yield concrete results.
| | OUTSOURCING CAD OFFSHORE: ASSESSING SERVICE PROVIDER RELIABILITYWritten by Lakshman Balaraman
If you have decided to outsource some of your CAD to an If you have decided to outsource some of your CAD to an offshore service provider ("OSP"), it is important that you carefully evaluate your potential partner first. Outsource to them only if they successfully pass through your appraisal sieve. Here are some important evaluation criteria and methods for assessing them: ---> Criterion: The OSP Should Be Web-Savvy Check if OSP has a website. If they do not, in all probability dealing with them will yield a bad experience. If they have a website, check whether their postal address and telephone number are displayed on it so that they are physically reachable. Give OSP credit if website has mostly text with limited graphics, has almost no animation, clearly explains what OSP is doing and is easy to navigate. This implies detailed knowledge on website design, which increases their ‘web-savvy’ rating. Your CAD outsourcing is most probably going to involve transferring large amounts of data over web. This calls for an OSP who is proficient with email. To evaluate this, send OSP a message asking for more information and see if you get a response within 12 hours. The response should be perfectly focused on your question. You have to be careful an autoresponder (ie, a web-based answering machine) is not replying to you, so formulate your question to require a tailor-made reply. Subsequently send two more questions related to work you are considering giving OSP. Check whether these responses too are timely and relevant. If OSP has a form on their website for sending them email, give them extra points (smart webmasters do not put their email addresses on their websites to discourage spam robots from finding addresses and sending junk mail to them). ---> Criterion: The OSP Should Have a Satisfactory Profile Email OSP a questionnaire that gathers a wide range of information on them. Decide whether you like what you find. This questionnaire should cover address information, telephone number of individual dealing with you, company history, financial performance, references, specific CAD capabilities, track record, installed hardware, software platforms, manpower, HRD policies, data security and physical security. (If you would like to save extended time and specialised labour involved in compiling such a questionnaire, you can buy a bank of 200+carefully formulated questions from The Magnum Group at http://themagnumgroup.net/cadques1.htm for under $15.)
|
