WhoDoYouKnowAt Semi-finalist in Innovation@Wharton Tournament

Wipro and Knowledge @ Wharton are sponsoring the prestigious Innovation @ Wharton Tournament. WhoDoYouKnowAt is pleased to announce that it is a semi-finalist for our business productivity tool. See our presentation.

The idea for the tournament is based on the book Innovation Tournaments by Wharton OPIM professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich.  The tournament allows “new ideas compete with one another in numerous rounds of vetting — that is, by running them through “innovation tournaments” — so that the strongest and most promising ideas make it to the final round”.   Learn more about the book here.

How One Client Achieved an 800% ROI with WhoDoYouKnowAt

WhoDoYouKnowAt is a business productivity tool that can help your company garner revenue gains and close more deals. Read our first Whitepaper on how a software company closed a huge sale and achieved a tremendous ROI.

Professional Networking Can Facilitate the Meeting of Supply and Demand for CRE

Commercial Real Estate (“CRE”) is suffering from a lack of liquidity not seen since the late ‘80s to very early ‘90s.  Property values are slowly adjusting to 60% of highs across most categories, and to avoid reality many are just holding with the hope of better times to come.  Over the long term, all markets are better served when liquidity is maximized.

However, professional networking may help space users find space, capital providers find CRE investments funds, and property buyers find sellers.  These economic transactions close when connections occur between the supplier and the consumer.  Online networking tools connect information and basically help those interested in an introduction extend their reach.  CRE has always been a relationship driven business this is just an efficient productivity enhancement.

This concept should be particularly interesting to organizations that have a number of employees that each have their contacts, but have no means to leverage across all contacts in a controlled private manner.  Let’s suppose a leasing agent has space that is ideal for a grocer.  The agent can maximize the number of possible space users and the possibility of finding the right contact by reaching across all the contacts of the firm.

Another example might be a new fund which has recently closed with a new team that has interest in Class A office in the Southwest.  A long term owner would like to get a measure of interest from them about his asset, but has no direct relationship.  The professional networking tool would allow them to reach out across all downstream contacts with whom they have agreed to share.

Low cost, easy use, no travel and increased opportunity sound like a positive to improving the likelihood of valued connections and thereby liquidity in CRE.

 

What’s your inter-employee communication like at work?

Shel Holtz’s blog, a shel of my former self, had an interesting post recently about networked companies – whereby employees are engaged with each other through social networking or company initiatives which might include communication about company research or awareness of business initiatives. The logic is that employees that are in better communication with each other, can leverage more resources from one another, share insights with ease, and ultimately become more productive.

Companies are slowly turning to Web 2.0 and activating more networking options for their organizations. What about your company? Tell us below in the poll.

Online Networking. The Results are in.

In our final series on our open networking survey results, we share with you our final results, including recommendations from recipients on improving online networking.

Frequency of Online Networking

Several recipients were unsure of how to use online networking to meet their career objectives, and therefore, were not very regular users of online networking platforms, as seen below. The remainder of users log in on a regular basis. There’s still a huge percentage of users that need more clarity / improvements on using these applications.

Does online networking resemble how you network in real life?

We also asked respondents if online networking resembled how they networked offline. 65% of respondents indicated it did not.

Why not?

Respondents identified the following weaknesses of online networking:

- Overly complex

- Too much information

- Difficult to determine which requests are legitimate

- Trivial & noisy

- Difficult to connect with those you’re connected to online

A lot of the “overload” of information that doesn’t add value is driven by the number of connections individuals make online, often, with those they do not have close relationships.

Recommendations

Our respondents had the following suggestions on how to improve open networking:

• Privacy
• Simple User Interface
• Sort through clutter
• Improved search
• Ability to add unique groups

What about you? What are your thoughts on these recommendations?

Over here, you know we emphasize privacy and believe this is critical so that you can leverage your trusted relationships.

CEO Lee Blaylock speaking at DallasBlue

Lee will be speaking about WhoDoYouKnowAt at a DallasBlue luncheon about business social networks sponsored by Haynes & Boone tomorrow. Other CEOs speaking will be from SalesBook and WhoYa, two other Dallas-based companies.  More information on how you can attend the lunch and be part of this interesting dialogue.

Online Networking. What ails you?

Continuing upon our survey series on networking, we last told you about the state of open networking and that many professionals found their current networking efforts online to be ineffective for their careers. But why exactly? Look no further, the results are in:

The top issues are: ineffective connections, insufficient privacy and lack of awareness on how to use online networking for one’s career. The first issue, of being connected to many people, but most of them weaker connections, is one that we’ve discussed before. Networks grow without adding significant value and can cloud your perception of how accessible and reliable your network truly is.

Privacy is obviously another huge concern and one that prevents usage of online networking tools altogether. Profiles can be made private, but on some applications, like LinkedIn, that can reduce efficacy of being discovered for recruiting purposes.

Not knowing how to use online networking to further one’s career is a common issue that many sites are seeking to solve today. In addition to a slew of books and how to use many applications, blogs have taken this field over, providing daily examples and use cases. We think this problem is not one that’s here to stay.

In the meantime, privacy and meaningful connections are valid concerns for professionals, and here at WhoDoYouKnowAt, we do our best to address this and offer a valuable platform for harnessing your business relationships.

A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit

Cindy Thompson, of A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit, discusses entrepreneurship, WhoDoYouKnowAt and more with Lee Blaylock, CEO, in this audio cast!

The State of Online Networking: I

In the summer of 2009, we conducted a non-affiliated survey of American professionals to understand more about their online networking habits on sites like LinkedIn, Xing, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. The results, in some cases, stray from expectations and point to this trend we spot of online: networks growing without adding much value.

Some of these results, particularly for job interest, could be swayed by the economic times, but in general, a fair amount, 49%, of professionals are primarily using online networking tools to advance their careers. But how effective do they rate these networks to be to further their career objectives?

These results are a bit more interesting – only 19% of those surveyed actually find their current open networks to be effective. Around 51% find it to be hardly effective at all. What are the reasons for this? We will continue to explore that and reveal our results over a series of upcoming posts, but till then, we want to hear from you – how effective are your current networking efforts online to your career? Tweet, comment, email or Facebook us back!

“Networks” are growing…but what about relationships?

In a recent piece in the New York Times Preoccupations section, Jon Picoult wrote an article entitled, “Networks Too Big for Their Own Good,” about getting an edge in the hiring process by both leveraging your mutual colleagues for candidate referrals and to “leave no stone unturned” and move outside the boundaries of your network to find great candidates. Just as one can find good news about the economy of the failed state of Somalia if you look hard enough, I agree that leaving no stone unturned can, at times, surface new candidates, or even new job opportunities if you are looking for a new position. However, ask yourself what you prefer – a strong candidate on paper whom you don’t know or share any mutual colleagues or friends, or a strong candidate with whom you know people in common and can perform your due diligence on without checking the proverbial “references” that are rarely insightful for numerous reasons.

Picoult mostly discredits candidates through “someone you know” because networks that have grown too large, now encompassing weak connections to constitute relationships. With the proliferation of social media and public databases of resumes and profiles, the signal to noise level on those sites cheapens the experience for all involved. Users who are connecting with too many people, sometimes greater than 10,000+ , have no ability to offer you a trusted introduction. This is true.

It is only when dealing with an introduction, that is trusted from all three people involved, can you make a true impact. Meeting someone online and then getting an intro from them is better than a cold call, but its still lower than a snake’s ass in a wagon rut, as they say in the country. Numerous books, Harvard Business Review case studies, Forbes and Fortune magazine articles have previously stated you already know everyone you need to know to make you successful, all you need to do is to mine those relationships better, cultivating the ones where you can offer the greatest value, while benefiting yourself at the same time. At the end, it’s the relationship that really matters.