Different Social Networks serve different purposes. “LinkedIn” has a more serious reputation for job seeking and career advancement in the white collar world.
Facebook seems to have attracted a large number of adults who wouldn’t be caught dead on MySpace and has a significant number of adults on the site who do have a business interest of some sort. The business people I see using it most frequently are network marketers.
There’s a hunger for social networking for business that gets past the silliness of much of the social networking world. Business people want results and profits, not mundane chatter that wastes there time.
Until such targeted networks emerge, people will keep trying to come up with them. The latest player in that world is PartnerUp.com which is seeking to fill the gap.
Maybe it has contacts you need? Let me know your impressions if you join!
Ryan Biddulph on February 6th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Hi Chuck,
I’ve received numerous invites to partnerup, haven’t taken a look at it yet. I am still working facebook and myspace. I want to limit the number of social networking sites which I join so I can focus on relationships instead of viewing it as a numbers game. In the same way, I’d like to join as many rapidly growing sites as possible. Just trying to find that balance. Thanks for sharing.
Ryan
Steve on February 7th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Hey Chuck-
Thanks so much for writing about us.
I co-founded PartnerUp because there wasn’t an online networking venue for small business that was focused on helping people find the things that they needed. In the case of small business owners and entrepreneurs, this was: people, advice, resources (service providers and commercial real estate), and networking opportunities.
We were acquired by Deluxe Corporation (www.deluxe.com) in July, 2008 and we’ve been seeing extremely rapid growth as we are starting to introduce PartnerUp to Deluxe’s more than 3 million small business customers.
Hopefully you and your readers like it!
-Steve