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Online networking community in China

Networking is becoming more sophisticated nowadays. After exchanging business cards, we can follow up by email or phone but the new trend is to do it online. Invite new contacts to join your favourite online business networking community like www.linkedin.com, www.spoke.com, or www.xing.com. Actually this can be quite addictive because you are continuously hoping to expand your circle of contacts. Sometimes, this just means adding new names to your contact list without adding any real value. The pride of having a long list of contacts becomes an ego boost. On Linkedin, you can see the number of contacts that you have displayed on your page. It may reveal that some of your contacts barely know anyone, which can lower your perception of that person’s social networking abilities. But others, who have an incredibly extensive list of contacts, might make you suddenly feel inadequate in your own networking skills. On the positive side, it can be a source of motivation to expand your circle of professional contacts.

Some Chinese professional feels that the online networking community lacks the human-feel of guanxi

The online business networking community is quite ‘in vogue’ in North America. Many of my professional friends are actively using business networking services like Linkedin to catalogue their contacts. After attending several business events in China, I have started to invite new contacts to join my online business networking community. It turns out that online business networking is just as prevalent here, because most of them are already members and have built up extensive online connections. The common complaint from many of the local professionals is that they don’t see a value in the “dormant relationship” style. This is a very interesting insight because the commonly used Chinese practice of guanxi (connection building) is one which requires constant nurturing and face-to-face interactions.

I believe that the online business networking community is a great complement to traditional networking, but I still feel that traditional networking is the ‘real thing’. Online business networking community just provides us with another tool for staying in touch.