Logging in to talk shop

Jim Rudnick had run his two small businesses out of his Hamilton, Ont.-area home for a couple of decades when a small office building became available in the adjoining village of Waterdown, and Mr. Rudnick decided to leave the nest. Leaving the home office entailed lots of decisions, such as what sort of Internet connection to install and where to get phone service. Mr. Rudnick researched the options, but still wasn’t sure what would be the best choice.

So he turned to LinkedIn, an online social-networking service that – unlike the popular consumer-oriented service Facebook – is aimed mainly at business and professional users. These sites can be good resources on a variety of fronts, but small businesses, especially, need to weigh the benefits of the services, compared with how much time they invest in the sites. For Mr. Rudnick, linking in gave him a leg up.

One of LinkedIn’s features allows members to post questions in a number of forums focused on particular topics and geographical areas. Mr. Rudnick asked for advice about Internet and phone services for his small businesses.

“I think I got eight or 10 answers,” he recalls, and of those, about five recommended the voice-over-Internet service of Vonage Holdings Corp.

Mr. Rudnick had not even considered Vonage up to that point, but he checked it out and ended up becoming a subscriber. Now, about 10 months later, he’s happy with the choice and credits LinkedIn with helping him make the right decision. Even after the move, Mr. Rudnick continues to use that feature for ongoing operations.

He starts every work day by browsing through several categories of LinkedIn Answers, looking for information that will help him run his two businesses (KKT Interactive designs websites and Flamboro Canada Systems hosts them; Mr. Rudnick is also on the board of his local business improvement association and is interested in wireless technologies as part of one of its projects). Social networking sites have other features businesses can use.

For instance, they let participants build profiles and create personal networks by linking to other users. On business-oriented sites – of which LinkedIn is currently the most prominent – these profiles resemble electronic résumés. Because of this, hiring employees, and finding work, are both popular uses of such services.

Cameron Laker, chief executive and founder of Vancouver-based Mindfield RPO Group, says his 11-employee recruiting firm often searches LinkedIn for people with the professional and management qualifications its clients are looking for. For recruiting hourly workers and tradespeople, he says, Mindfield prefers Facebook. And special-interest groups on another social networking site called Ning are good places to look for people with specialized technical skills, such as programming using relatively obscure languages like Ruby, he adds.

When Lauren Friese launched TalentEgg, a Toronto-based website for university and college graduates that she describes as “almost like a campus career fair online,” one of her biggest challenges was credibility.

“I sound young, I am young, and I didn’t know anybody in this field,” she says. Ms. Friese found LinkedIn helped her get in the doors of companies she wanted to participate in TalentEgg.

“I don’t even know how I would have found names without LinkedIn,” she says, and being able to call people and mention mutual connections helped her to be heard.

Where to network

Facebook: One of the most popular consumer social-networking sites, originally designed for students, then opened to the rest of the world early last year. Because of its popularity, more business people are signing up, and some employers use it as a recruiting tool. LinkedIn: Launched in 2002, LinkedIn is used mainly by business people and professionals. Users can create résumé-like professional profiles and use them to network for business. They can also ask and answer questions and use groups to communicate with people with similar interests. Orkut: A social network launched by Google in 2004. Participants post profiles – which have categories for social, professional and personal information – share photos and exchange messages with friends, and create communities focused on shared interests. MySpace: One of the earliest social networking sites, MySpace was launched in 2003 and acquired in 2005 by News Corp. It remains the biggest but has lost some ground to Facebook. Ning: Launched in 2005, Ning is a platform for creating social networks around specific areas of interest. It hosts more than 185,000 networks, many quite specialized. Plaxo: Plaxo is first and foremost an online address book. Users store their contact information on Plaxo’s servers, so updates are immediately available to their contacts. In 2007, Plaxo launched Plaxo Pulse, which adds other social networking features to the address book.

Not everyone uses social networking for making connections to get work. Mr. Rudnick, for instance, says, “I’m more than busy enough to do what I need to do without searching for business.”

But sales pitches abound on LinkedIn, he says. If someone asks a question like “where can I get Web hosting in Dallas,” he comments, there will probably be 300 answers and 295 of them will be from Dallas-area Web hosting firms pitching for business. But Mr. Rudnick says the other five answers, from people who have experience actually dealing with some of those companies, are probably the most valuable.

Nor does he believe in building a vast online network for its own sake. Mr. Rudnick has between 30 and 40 contacts in his LinkedIn network, all people he knows personally. He uses those contacts primarily for knowledgeable advice. “The best way of describing it would be my companies’ or small businesses’ advisory board,” he says.

Ed Daugavietis, senior analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, says a presence on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook is becoming “table stakes” for businesses – something customers expect and increasingly that younger employees expect, too.

That kind of thinking is one reason Ms. Friese has a presence on Facebook. She has started a group on Facebook “just so that if somebody searches Facebook for TalentEgg there is something to find,” she says – but her expectations of the group as a marketing tool aren’t high. On the other hand, TalentEgg also places advertisements on Facebook, and Ms. Friese says that works well.

Mr. Daugavietis says business people need to think about what benefit they can get from social networking tools, and that will probably vary depending on the nature of the business.

Those that depend heavily on collaboration can probably get significant gains, he says. But small businesses in particular need to be careful not to invest unreasonable amounts of time in them. “The question is,” he says, “does it justify the investment?”

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