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Perils of online business networking

Posted by Cathryn in : Miscellaneous , trackback

Its a wonderful new, connected world, and a great way to do business. Whether its as simple as a google group, or a complex site with profiles, clubs, meeting calendars, personal messaging and search facilities, online social networking is the way the world is moving.

There are some pitfalls though, and they’re not the obvious ones relating to scams and criminal behaviour. If a lot of your business or social life depends on one of these networks, and it disappears suddenly, it can be very difficult to rebuild offline. You may have little recourse to the owners of the site, as the terms and conditions imposed on members normally allow instant termination of membership and give no guarantees of stability or availability.

If you’re using them in a business context, there are a few things to do to make sure you’re protected
1. Keep your contacts safe, and don’t rely on the site to give them to you. After all, if you’re going to communicate with someone, having their email address or phone number isn’t unreasonable. LinkedIn, for instance, makes it easy for you to do this, a real strength of that site.

2. If you post articles or other entries which you would like to use elsewhere, keep a copy yourself. These days, its probably better to have your own blog, and put links to new entries on a networking site, rather than the full content.

3. Don’t become too reliant on any one site, unless you are sure that the terms and conditions of use are sufficiently reliable for business use. ecademy, for instance, allows the sites owners to terminate your access and/or membership at no notice and its conditions state that contact details will not be given out under those circumstances. That’s not unusual, but this particular one does have a history of using this facility in circumstances which many would consider unreasonable.

You might gather that I’ve been slightly singed by Ecademy this week. Fortunately, it wasn’t crucial to my business and I had the information I needed from it elsewhere, but its still annoying. Its an fantastic, fascinating world out there, and I’ve got a huge amount out of these types of sites, but it pays to take care.

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