WHEN Paulo Penteado went prospecting for new business opportunities in the US a few years ago, he could have contacted the Australian Government and asked for help, or travelled there and burnt $100,000 on flights, accommodation and other expenses.
And he would probably still be waiting for someone of importance to return his calls.
Instead he turned to LinkedIn, a website that puts business leaders in touch with each other, often at the most stratospheric heights of an organisation.
LinkedIn is a leader in the new generation of social networking services that span a range of human activities from setting up romantic dates and friendships to hard-core business relationships.
The only experience most Australians have of social networking software is occasional email messages requesting they "please join my network". But for Paulo Penteado, director of strategic projects at Beacon Consulting, social networking provides tangible benefits to him and his business.
"What I liked about it was that it is a place for professional contacts," Mr Penteado says. "LinkedIn is about keeping track of who you‘ve worked with and who you want to keep in touch with. Of the 600 people in my contacts, at least 550 I have known personally and interacted with."
Networks such as his are changing from small, closely knit circles into widespread webs of useful information. Tools such as LinkedIn give users the ability to track contacts as they move through their careers, and discover who among them has other useful associates. The result: meetings and sales leads.
Mr Penteado recalls a successful attempt to form an alliance with a large US software company. "We needed to establish this relationship very high up," he says. "The question was, with 10,000 people in there, how did we get to the right person? So I used LinkedIn to find people I knew who were well placed within that company. I found two alumni from (the University of California) Berkeley who I knew very well, and one of them offered to put me in contact with the CEO. This led to a very large deal for us. As a tool, it saved me time to get to the right person."
Although the network takes time to maintain, Mr Penteado is convinced of its value. "Of the business opportunities that have been presented to me and to Beacon, only two of them were really interesting," Mr Penteado says. "But I would rather say no to half a dozen and have two that were interesting, than not get those two. So I don‘t consider it a waste of time. You have to be out there to get the opportunities, and the side-effect of that, in any kind of business, is that you are going to get some that are bad."
Mr Penteado also uses social networking software as a recruiting tool. He posted a job notification to people in his network, which was then passed on to other networks, leading to the filling of several positions, including marketing manager.
Although there are many competing services, Mr Penteado says LinkedIn‘s size enhances its usefulness. "There are competing platforms but I just haven‘t got on to them because most of the people I want to contact are on LinkedIn," he says.
The California-based vice-president of marketing for LinkedIn, Konstantin Guericke, says that since last October the network‘s registered users in Australia leapt from 700,000 to 1 million. Australian growth is outpacing the company‘s global expansion, which climbed from 3.6 million to 5 million members over the same period.
Mr Guericke says LinkedIn will reach profitability this month, based on the adoption of paid premium services.
The message being pushed by social networking organisations such as LinkedIn is that if you are in business and not networking online, your competitors have the edge on you. "It used to be that a young professional‘s network consisted of six friends and their dad‘s uncle," says Elliott Masie, president of the Masie Centre in the US and author of a weekly industry newsletter distributed to 55,000 executives.
Even an average student who doesn‘t think much about networking in the traditional sense has dozens of friends in his or her Facebook network, an online directory for universityand secondary students.
"We are amazed by the sheer number of grads staying connected to others today," says Christopher Morris, director of MBA career management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Sites such as Facebook are often referred to as viral in their spread, meaning the new friends you acquire via the network give you access to all their friends. People enter the workforce with hundreds of contacts - and they‘re eager and ready to deploy them.
Today‘s power networkers aren‘t hoarding contacts, they‘re sharing information in unprecedented amounts at unbelievable speed.
"They‘re far more open about discussing their private lives, from what they did at that party this weekend, to salary information about their jobs," says Mr Morris. "What used to be difficult to get, you can now just ask."
Elliott Masie sees this warp-speed, ultraconnected culture at work in his business: "Students who do internships with me use Facebook more than email." "One used Facebook to decide not to take a full-time job she was offered," he says. "Her network told her it wasn‘t a good place to work."
"This is a group with a team, a project, and a collaborator mentality," says Alice Snell vice-president of the talent-management research division at Taleo, a San Francisco-based company that produces human-resource software for companies such as Citigroup, Honeywell, and Dell. If there‘s a tech problem, their first instinct is to instant-message a geek buddy for advice. If they‘re on a product-development team they‘ll reach out to friends for input, not necessarily caring whether they‘re observing traditional corporate boundaries. If they hate their boss, they might post that on their blog.
The increasing breadth and power of employees‘ personal networks to disperse information about work experiences will force companies to rethink how they organise teams and departments. Look for interdisciplinary teams that involve employees from different generations in an effort to take advantage of as many perspectives and sources of input as possible.
It‘s possible that companies will flatten their hierarchies even more than we‘ve already seen, in an effort to make junior employees - with their brainstorming networks - feel more empowered to speak up and contribute ideas at work.
It will also affect what sorts of controls they try to exert on communication with peers outside company walls.
Trying to shut down these informal networks obviously won‘t work, even if companies find them threatening. The only option, predicts Mr Masie, will be a "high level of honesty and transparency" and the incorporation of rewards for those employees who use their networks on the company‘s behalf.
Mr Masie says it is important to look at your circle of acquaintances graphically. There are business-oriented web services such as LinkedIn and Ryze to track and expand your personal network. Or go the old-fashioned route: stick a big sheet of paper up on the wall and map out everyone you know, how you know them, and how they connect to one another. "If it‘s not visual, it‘s easy to miss things," he says. "Look at it and realise this is an asset you can legitimately mature."
Then look beyond your peer group. "Operate up ," Mr Masie says. "Too many people forget to do that." Recognise the value of mentors and identify those above you who can help you learn.
Mr Morris adds that technology is just a "new enabler. These are still relationships. They have to be cultivated." A long list of names is meaningless unless it represents real relationships, developed by offering your own help and input.
Your network may make companies transparent to you but you‘re transparent to employers too. Anything online, whether easily available or tucked away in a private network, is fair game. There may be several versions of you projected into the world. Not all of them will necessarily be what you want an employer to see. If you can‘t control that, make sure you can live with it.
Tempering this concern is that as "more information gets out there about everyone, it diffuses the importance of each individual piece of information", says Mr Morris.
New reputation management services such as ZoomInfo offer to groom the online you. ZoomInfo aggregates information about people from the web into profiles with a professional focus. The company‘s technology crawls the web matching names with information such as location, position, education, experiences, and credentials. Even Google uses ZoomInfo when it‘s looking for a particular kind of person to fill a job opening.
"We‘ve got 70 million people identified," says ZoomInfo founder and CEO Jonathan Stern. "We‘re able to create power searches to find people with specific certifications, who have worked at specific places or have specific affiliations." Mr Stern calls it "comparison shopping" for the kinds of people companies would like to hire. And you have input into what appears on your label when those hiring managers go shopping.
Solid communication skills, analytical thinking and being a quick study are the new keys to success.
Even a degree with a bit more mass appeal, such as communications, shows how quickly things change. If you graduated even three years ago, such emerging niche media as blogs, podcasts and satellite radio are new to you. Whatever specifics you learned in school are hopelessly out of date.
Many of today‘s exciting jobs (Java developer, brand-experience designer) didn‘t exist 10 years ago. And the exciting professions of tomorrow have yet to be imagined.
"What you want to learn is how to learn," says Taleo‘s Ms Snell. And that‘s where the liberal-arts education becomes valuable again.
LABOUR trends point to the increasing importance of adaptability. Forrester Research‘s Claire Schooley anticipates that today‘s youngest workers will hold 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetimes - some of them simultaneously.
One way to approach lifelong learning is to think about what‘s threatening your job or your company. "Everyone can articulate what they‘re threatened by," says Rob McGovern, author of Bring Your ‘A‘ Game. "Years ago, when I worked at HP, a few people went to Microsoft. We worried about what Microsoft was doing. If you‘re at Microsoft today, you‘re worrying about Google. Go find out about the thing that threatens you. Understand it. You might pick the wrong company but what you will learn will always be valuable."
If your degree gets you in the door, it‘s your experience that will take you to the executive suite.
The lesson here is to consider what‘s at the root of what you do now and think about the platforms where your ideas will create a new product. We need to feed the different parts of our personality, because one job may not provide all of the satisfaction we need to derive from work.
Although everyone may already be willing to take a new job if a great new gig smacks them in the face, the changing nature of technology means that we‘ll all be in the job market, all the time, even if we‘re happily employed.
The next generation of online job services gives more control to the employer than the job seeker. Employers are tired of sifting through a pool limited to the unemployed and disaffected. Those aren‘t the best candidates. "We‘re all about the employed person," says Mr McGovern, who founded job-matching service Mkt10 to meet this shift. "Companies want the top performers who are already doing well."
That also means the gloves have come off. "Ten years ago people didn‘t admit they were trying to hire the already employed," says ZoomInfo‘s Mr Stern. "Now it‘s the other company‘s problem to figure out how to keep their own employees."
Missele Vegas, the HR director at VitalSpring Technologies, a health-care-benefits software company in McLean, Virginia, has been beta-testing Mkt10 to find candidates. She has used Monster since 1996 to fill positions but says it too often left her with resume spam and mismatched candidates. She is using Mkt10 to look for everything from a CFO to an SAP program director. "It cuts down a lot of my pre-work."
A pool of on-demand workers will be created by helping us think about ourselves and our goals. "In the future (employers) aren‘t going to advertise job openings," says Warren Bare, CEO and founder of Jobkabob, another US job-matching service. "They‘ll find you." It‘s a scary prospect for anyone who has ever been out of work, but for the well-presented, ever-learning, constantly networking performer, it sounds perfect.
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