Are You Being Yourself?

With more and more people going into social networking, it's really important that you put across your true personality in your interactions with the people you come into contact with. Most people are happy to do this, after all, online networking is about building relationships in the same way as going to a normal offline networking event. People buy from people and that's what networking is all about.

However, recently I've come across a couple of cases where people are looking for someone else to do this on their behalf. I was quite surprised to find an email in my inbox recently offering services to set up and manage a Twitter account on my behalf, including doing the 'tweets'. How could someone else possibly know what I'd want to tweet about, my views on something, what I like to re-tweet, who I like to talk to - and above all, my know my business that well? It would be the same as sending someone to networking events on my behalf. Most people on Twitter are quite savvy and would soon smell a rat anyway. What would that do for my business? More harm than good I suspect. I was also recently asked if I knew anyone who could handle online networking for someone, of course, I warned them that it was a bad idea!

Perhaps people are trying to spread themselves too thinly and believe they should have profiles everywhere to make social networking work, but it's not like that. If you feel you should be networking online but haven't really got the time for it, then take one site at a time. Start with an easy one, such as Twitter and see how you get on with it before taking on an account with Facebook or LinkedIn. They all require some commitment, but once you find out which of these sites work best for you, you'll soon find there's only one or two sites you spend most of your time on, and you certainly don't need anyone to do it for you.

Don't ever be tempted to allow someone to do your networking on your behalf. By all means get advice, a strategy from an expert, but at the end of the day it all has to come from you. It's your own personality and how you interact with the people you meet that will really make the difference.