“Are you on Facebook?” This, coming from a colleague I bumped into in the street. I had asked for his contact information, to set a date to talk business over coffee.

I admit this particular social networking website has yet to draw me in, even though I get one or two emails a week saying I’ve been added as a ‘friend’. That said, I do recognize the value in this form of communication (which sits under the umbrella of ‘social media’). A quick search of Facebook produces a number of well-known retailers who have caught the bug — Target, Martha Stewart, and Starbucks all have pages on the site. This clearly indicates that there are, at the least, branding opportunities to be had there.

But what if you’re a smaller retailer? Are social media applications like Facebook relevant to your business? Read more...

A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from the San Francisco Bay area about a job. The caller found my name and profile on an online networking website I had joined the day before. Then, he ‘Googled’ me and found my personal website and contact information. “Is this how you usually look for contractors?” I asked. “Of course,” he answered, “online networking is the fastest way to find qualified people.”

Now, I’ve never been much of a ‘networker’. That’s why this online thing appealed to me. I could do it without having to attend an actual event. But getting a phone call from a stranger, miles away, was something I never expected when I signed up on a whim.

It led me to wonder if there was more to online business networking than I’d previously thought. So, I decided to do a little research. Here’s what I found. Read more...

Oh, there’s still so much learn about the Internet. Did you know the web had ‘editions’ and we’re now on ’2.0′? Yes, you blinked. Web 1.0 (coined retroactively after 2.0 became the ‘it’ term among the technical elite) is long-gone and Web 2.0 has taken its place as the ‘second-generation’ Internet, heralding an age of new, fraternal technologies and a social and cultural shift towards a more web-centric universe.

Web 2.0, in a nutshell

The World Wide Web has evolved from a ‘silo-based’ content storage solution (think isolated, static HTML websites and simple searches) into a decentralized, deep-linking, information and computing platform that harnesses collective intelligence, and facilitates interconnectivity and information sharing (think blogs, RSS, tagging, aggregate readers and online collaboration tools). Read more...