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...

Recently, I wrote about what I thought were going to be the big e-business trends of the coming year, and word-of-mouth marketing (aka viral marketing) was one of them. In short, word-of-mouth marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to pass a marketing message along informally to others in their social network.

True to prediction, over the holidays, a very creative e-card designed by Michigan-based marketing company Enlighten began making its way around North America. According to MarketingSherpa, the Holiday Excuse Generator “was so creative that it landed major media and blog attention, 50,000 mainly viral visits [to the company microsite], and gained the agency proposal requests from five new brand-name clients.”

The concept was simple: Show off the company’s skills by developing a slick, interactive, creative campaign with a purpose to drive people to pass it on by email. 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...