I needed to tap into my network of people across a few social networking sites today, to recruit a part-timer for a project and to see if anyone could help find a home for the Social Tech Solutions empire.

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

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A new service came out of beta this week 123people.com – in their words:

123people is a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more.

Now I tried a few searches including myself, whilst it was kind of frightening just how much about me is online it didn’t pull up anything I wasn’t aware of.

It seems to be most effective for people in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the US… so for purely academic purposes I tried searching for Jessica Alba which it suggested on its front page.

Wow.

Directory listings, Social Networking pages, Email addresses and phone numbers to suit all of your stalking reconnection needs.

Sure, most of this stuff was easily accessible anyway, its not doing anything really new apart from the way it presents the information and the accuracy compared with a google search of the same name.

Its only purpose is to locate people, so you avoid all the pointless links from other search engines and get straight to ways of getting back in contact.

useful, yes if you need to contact someone – scary, yes… try it, search for yourself…

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I’m a geek, I think we established that… as a geek, I like to try new sites and applications when they come out, often discarding them if they don’t offer any real business benefit.

Twitter was one of those. I set up a personal account… I could see how it was useful for certain types of internet users, to share ideas… I got that sometimes it was the best way of rapidly publishing information when you need to share updates with friends/colleagues or customers – like live blogging from a conference to say “this is on at stand so n so in 20mins” – in the US the SMS updates are free – but I didn’t really get how it was useful to most businesses.

I realised something yesterday, and I hold my hand up, I should of pieced it all together sooner..

EVERY status update on twitter (some people call it a “tweet”) gets its own URL – take a recent update from us about GimPhoto for example.

Yes, the link has a “Nofollow” tag… but… there is plenty of discussion about how the different engines actually use nofollow.

I’m also pretty sure that my rapidly rising traffic isn’t just because of my amazing writing style (ahem), I’ll be having a dig in Analytics, but I’m sure Twitter has driven traffic to this site.

Add to this the following post about Twitter and SEO (You should all subscribe to Blogstorm btw)

It makes me think that Twitter is not only a great way to communicate to a wider group of people (it is searchable) but it must help with SEO.

I’m NOT an SEO guru, but I’d love to hear from some of you that are!

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The next date for my talk “The Social Web in 10 Slides” is November the 13th.

I’ve been really inspired by the reaction to this talk, both in person and the webinar version I presented a couple of weeks ago.

What’s in the talk?

I cover all aspects of the social web from a business perspective.

The Social Web in 10 Slides

Why Social Networking matters
Overview of the main players
Taking the social out of social networking
Usage and Users
Monetizing the Social Web
Case study
Interest is not Intent
Do’s n Don’ts
Corporate and Policy considerations
The future of the Social Graph

BONUS

Social Bookmarking – delivering traffic through the social web.

It’s an Intergage client seminar (free if you’re an Intergage client) at the Burley Manor Hotel, there are limited places available to paying attendees – to request a place on the seminar, please use this booking form.

If you’d be interested in me presenting this to your company or business group, please contact me for more details.

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And now for something less serious…

Ever noticed how Web 2.0 (whatever that is) applications loves things to be in “Beta”… well Facebook has the ultimate beta…

You can now change your language setting to “English (Pirate) – Beta”.

No really…

…amusing – yes

…useful – not really

…beta? – pirates in beta??

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