Women are less likely to publish information that reveals methods of contacting them. Personality measures openness , extraversion , and conscientiousness were found to positively affect the willingness to disclose data, while neuroticism decreases the willingness to disclose personal information.

Another debate lies in the design of algorithmic systems to target specific audiences on social networking sites. With multiple formats for marketing, Facebook offers a variety of direct marketing options for advertisers to reach their intended audience. For example, these ads may appear as suggested ad posts on the home News Feed or on the right side of the feed as a banner.

Businesses may create a page to outline their company and post related information, promotions and contact information to it, directly reaching their interested audience. Users who "like" a business page will be subscribed to receive these business' updates on their home News Feed. Banner ads and suggested posts are paid for by marketers and advertisers to reach their intended audience. A study of the emotional responses to advertising on Facebook found that Business Pages found the highest appeal to users because they were only recommended when liked by the user or the user's friends.

The quantity of engagement on Facebook posts are measured, relaying important information about the user audience and their actions online. The debate questions to what extent the design of these systems is compromising the needs, privacy and information of the users. More research is needed to evaluate if allowing advertising to access user information to specifically tailor content to their choices and interactions, for example by placing ads within their personal feeds and throughout their use of the site, is compromising the user's information and social wellbeing.

John Herrman compares the function of algorithms in adjusting content to an omniscience and recounts the unpleasant experiences that coincide as a result. He calls to web browsing on Amazon, where products he browsed through briefly reappear on other news feeds, including his Instagram feed. On April 10, Mark Zuckerberg testified before congress on questions defining Facebook's policy, information handling and data design systems. Congress placed emphasis on addressing Facebook's tracking of user data online, skeptical that the social networking site can regulate itself.

Through data mining , companies are able to improve their sales and profitability.

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With this data, companies create customer profiles that contain customer demographics and online behavior. A recent strategy has been the purchase and production of " network analysis software". This software is able to sort out through the influx of social networking data for any specific company.

Facebook's controversial "Social Ads" program gives companies access to the millions of profiles in order to tailor their ads to a Facebook user's own interests and hobbies. However, rather than sell actual user information, Facebook sells tracked "social actions". That is, they track the websites a user uses outside of Facebook through a program called Facebook Beacon.

There has been a trend for social networking sites to send out only "positive" notifications to users. For example, sites such as Bebo, Facebook, and MySpace will not send notifications to users when they are removed from a person's friends list. Likewise, Bebo will send out a notification if a user is moved to the top of another user's friends list but no notification is sent if they are moved down the list.

This allows users to purge undesirables from their list extremely easily and often without confrontation since a user will rarely notice if one person disappears from their friends list.


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It also enforces the general positive atmosphere of the website without drawing attention to unpleasant happenings such as friends falling out, rejection and failed relationships. Many social networking services, such as Facebook , provide the user with a choice of who can view their profile. This is supposed to prevent unauthorized users from accessing their information. By making their profile private, teens can select who may see their page, allowing only people added as "friends" to view their profile and preventing unwanted viewing of the profile by parents.

Most teens are constantly trying to create a structural barrier between their private life and their parents. This is designed to prevent unauthorized users from adding, changing, or removing personal information, pictures, or other data. Social networking sites have created issues among getting hired for jobs and losing jobs because of exposing inappropriate content, posting photos of embarrassing situations or posting comments that contain potentially offensive comments e. There are works which recommend friends to social networking users based on their political opinions.

If a potential applicant expresses personal opinions on political issues or makes potentially embarrassing posts online on a publicly available social networking platform, employers can access their employees' and applicants' profiles, and judge them based on their social behavior or political views. According to Silicon Republic's statistics, 17, young people in six countries were interviewed in a survey.

There have been numerous cases where employees have lost jobs because their opinions represented their companies negatively. In September , a woman got fired over Facebook because she posted disruptive information about her company stating that military patrons should not receive special treatment or discounts. A manager of the company found her opinion online, disagreed with it, and fired her because it went against the company's mission statement.

10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Networking Skills - How To Network With People Even If You're Shy!

She lost her job, and was put under investigation by the Secret Service. Not only have employees lost their jobs in the United States, but it has happened with social network users internationally. In April , a Lloyd's banking group employee in the United Kingdom was fired for making a sarcastic post about the higher salary of her boss in relation to hers. The photo went viral exposing it all over the Internet. The company decided to cut her benefits because it was costing them additional funds. Cases like these have created some privacy implications as to whether or not companies should have the right to look at employees' social network profiles.

In March , Facebook decided they might take legal action against employers for gaining access to employee's profiles through their passwords. He also said users shouldn't be forced to share private information and communications just to get a job. According to the network's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, sharing or soliciting a password is a violation to Facebook. Employees may still give their password information out to get a job, but according to Erin Egan, Facebook will continue to do their part to protect the privacy and security of their users.

The relative freedom afforded by social networking services has caused concern regarding the potential of its misuse by individual patrons. He had posted a fake page on Facebook purporting to be that of a former school friend Matthew Firsht, with whom he had fallen out in The page falsely claimed that Firsht was homosexual and that he was dishonest. At the same time, genuine use of social networking services has been treated with suspicion on the ground of the services' misuse. In September , the profile of Australian Facebook user Elmo Keep was banned by the site's administrators on the grounds that it violated the site's terms of use.

Keep is one of several users of Facebook who were banned from the site on the presumption that their names aren't real, as they bear resemblance to the names of characters like Sesame Street 's Elmo. Online social networks have also become a platform for spread of rumors, one such study has analyzed rumors in retrospect. There are different forms where user data in social networks are accessed and updated without a user's permission. Citizens and governments have been concerned with misuse of social networking services by children and teenagers, in particular in relation to online sexual predators.

For instance, there is a study which suggests the children are not too far from inappropriate content on YouTube. It was deemed "the largest crimes against children case brought anywhere by anyone". According to the article, High Tech or High Risks: Moral Panics About Girls Online, it suggests that young girls are more at risks because they are often represented through "products of play" in transgressive poses because they often manipulate other users online by making themselves look older than what they actually appear which can attract sexual predators.

Many parents of teenage girls worry about their safety online because of the many manipulations there are online and on social networking sites. Social networking can also be a risk to child safety in another way; parents can get addicted to games and neglect their children. One instance in South Korea resulted in the death of a child from starvation.

Social networking sites such as Facebook are occasionally used to emotionally abuse, harass or bully individuals, either by posting defamatory statements or by forwarding private digital photos or videos that can have an adverse impact on the individuals depicted in the videos. Such actions are often referred to as "trolling". Confrontations in the real world can also be transferred to the online world. Individuals troll for many reasons. The psychology behind why people troll according to Psychology Today is due to anonymity, perceived obscurity, and a perceived lack of consequences for online misbehavior.

Trolls may also do their activities due to a perceived majority status, social identity salience and due to a sense by the troll that she or he is surrounded by online 'friends'. Trolls may also engage in harmful acts due to desensitization or negative personality traits Fox, Trolling is a prominent issue in the s, and as the Internet and social media is consistently expanding and more individuals sign up to social networking sites, more people come under fire and become the target of trolls.

As more people sign up to social networking sites, more celebrities are also becoming more prominent on these sites. With a variety of celebrities joining social networking sites, trolls tend to target abuse towards them. With some famous people gaining an influx of negative comments and slew of abuse from trolls it causes them to 'quit' social media. One prime example of a celebrity quitting social media is Stephen Fry. He left Twitter due to "too much aggression and unkindness around" emphasizing how trolls can negatively impact people's lives Cohen, As trolling can lead to celebrities deleting their social networks such as Twitter, it emphasizes how trolls can win, and can ruin people's lives.

While trolls believe that they do not face consequences and can troll others on the Internet without repercussions, in the s, due to high-profile cases where cyberbullies have allegedly been factors in suicides attributed to bullying , more laws have been put in place by governments. Trolls can face going to prison for certain actions that they take on the Internet, such as spreading hate speech such as racist messages.

One of the highest profile cases is racist trolling. Racist trolling has seen individuals been sent to prison for Tweets they have sent that to them may have seemed harmless and not racist. One case of this in recent years is Liam Stacey who was jailed for fifty-six days for tweeting offensive messages such as 'Muamba is dead, hahahaha', referring to when footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed during a professional football game for Bolton Wanders Williams, Online bullying, also called cyberbullying , is a relatively common occurrence and it can often result in emotional trauma for the victim.

The teenager expresses frustration towards networking sites like MySpace because it causes drama and too much emotional stress. Individuals are given the power to post offensive remarks or pictures that could potentially cause a great amount of emotional pain for another individual. Interpersonal communication has been a growing issue as more and more people have turned to social networking as a means of communication. Further, social networking sites have become popular sites for youth culture to explore themselves, relationships, and share cultural artifacts".

Stated by Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist, "My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment". The convenience that social network sites give users to communicate with one another can also damage their interpersonal communication.

Sherry Turkle, the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, stated, "Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed--and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing". They become confused about companionship". As social networking sites have risen in popularity over the past years, people have been spending an excessive amount of time on the Internet in general and social networking sites in specific.

This has led researchers to debate the establishment of Internet addiction as an actual clinical disorder. In a Newsweek article, Johannah Cornblatt explains "Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone.

Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, claims that social networking can foster feelings of sensitivity to disconnection, which can lead to loneliness. The researchers found that online social networking plays a positive role in subjective well-being when the networking is used to facilitate physical interactions, but networking activities that do not facilitate face-to-face interactions tend to erode trust, and this erosion can then negatively affect subjective well-being independent of the online social interaction itself.

Sabatini and Sarracino conclude that "The overall effect of networking on individual welfare is significantly negative. There has been rapid growth in the number of U. The number of published applications has been growing rapidly since There are now [ when? As many as 7, applications may be currently on file including those that haven't been published yet. It has been reported that social networking patents are important for the establishment of new start-up companies. A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users.

For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.

The patent has garnered attention due to its similarity to the popular social networking site Facebook. What types of speech workers are protected from being fired for on social networking websites has been an issue for American companies with over complaints as of on this topic having been made to the National Labor Relations Board NLRB. Most of the existing SNS sites use one or multiple dedicated data centers to serve all its users.

Such infrastructure-based systems faces over-provisioning during non-peak hours, while may encounter service outage during peak hours, due to the highly dynamic of SNS users' activities. There are several proposals, leveraging a decentralized architecture to ensure the scalability of SNS sites with low infrastructure cost. There is a growing number of social network users who decide to quit their user account by committing a so-called virtual identity suicide or Web 2. A study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking investigated this phenomenon from the perspective of Facebook users.

Facebook quitters were found to be more concerned about privacy, more addicted to the Internet and more conscientious. Sites such as Facebook are becoming increasingly popular tools for methods of ending relationships and friendships, proving that although new media is being used as a tool for connecting with individuals, it is now creating new problems associated with disconnecting from others.

The problem with that is that you are left with no closure and the entire online world now knows you are no longer in a relationship. This creates further problems, as it is even more crucial to 'save face' after one's relationship has been broken when one is connected to new media technologies. Erving Goffman argues that all social life boils down to face-to-face interactions.

These interpersonal interactions are mediated by what Goffman terms as "face-work", which are the actions undertaken to maintain consistency with one's face, and to uphold the expressive order of social situations. Individuals attempt to keep a positive image of the self when interacting with others, and in order to do so, they may have to alter their appearance or manner in some way.

If someone breaks up with you, you can actively choose what "face" you want to present to your friends, including your ex. You can choose to either post sad updates, which is the most natural thing you would want to do, or you can "save face" by posting happy updates and pictures of you going out with your friends. Even though you may be absolutely heartbroken within, Facebook allows you to hide your true feelings from the online world, and from your ex, by manipulating your profile.

New media is being utilized as a tool for helping users present a desirable image of themselves, enabling them to save face in difficult situations. Many people find that the only way to really move on from a past relationship is to cut the person out of their life completely. Social media has made this process much more complicated and difficult.

Many digital social networking sites leave behind a trail of a user's interactions, [] so deleting content may be an arduous process, more difficult than simply burning or throwing away an entire box of letters, photos, and mementos. The increasing number of messages and social relationships embedded in SNS also increases the amount of social information demanding a reaction from SNS users.

This dark side of SNS usage is called 'social overload'. The psychological and behavioral consequences of social overload include perceptions of SNS exhaustion, low user satisfaction, and high intentions to reduce or stop using SNS. Smart phones and social networking services enable us to stay connected continuously with people around us or far away from us, which however is sometimes the root of our anxiety in social life. The eager to know what everyone was saying and the tendency to see if anyone shared new things are typical "symptoms" of this anxiety called FoMO. There is a study that examined possible connections between FOMO and social media engagement indicating that FoMO was associated with lower need satisfaction, mood and life satisfaction.

Another type of social anxiety is the FoBM fear of being missed. The FoBM is a counterpart of FoMO; however, compared to FoMO it may have a more serious impact since the exclusion from the conversation can result in continuous exclusion later. The number of contacts on a social platform is sometimes considered an indicator of social capital. However, studies [] [] show it is rather an indicator of low self-esteem and of a form of social compensation. Indeed, people tend to add friends to compensate low self-esteem and there is a high correlation between the number of "friends" on social media platforms and feeling social anxiety, leading to symptoms of major depression and dysthymia.

If we consider this aspect with regards to the relationships maintained through social media platforms, we can easily point out a change in our understanding of friendship. As a matter of fact, online platforms and social media services altered the old definition of friendship. Indeed, friendship "redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves" as stated by Francis Bacon. When it comes to friendship, we can wonder whether friendship on online platforms is a real form of friendship, or it is just a sort of metaphor to compensate for social communication problems.

Actually, a lot of changes can be spotted in its old definition compared to the one in the era of social media. Friendship used to relate to the public sphere as explained in Nicomachean Ethics , however nowadays friendship is rather exposed publicly on different social media platforms. Moreover, a study [] shows that Facebook users know only a bit more than two thirds of their "friends" on the platform, meaning that they did not know one third of the individuals in their friend-lists. This raises security and privacy issues and the project researchers alerted participants that they would better unfriend people they did not recognize.

Social networking services are increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Information posted on sites such as MySpace and Facebook has been used by police forensic profiling , probation, and university officials to prosecute users of said sites. In some situations, content posted on MySpace has been used in court. Facebook is increasingly being used by school administrations and law enforcement agencies as a source of evidence against student users. This site being the number one online destination for college students, allows users to create profile pages with personal details.

These pages can be viewed by other registered users from the same school, which often include resident assistants and campus police who have signed up for the service. Social networking is more recently being used by various government agencies. Social networking tools serve as a quick and easy way for the government to get the suggestion of the public and to keep the public updated on their activity, however this comes with a significant risk of abuse, for example to cultivate a culture of fear such as that outlined in Nineteen Eighty-Four or THX The Centers for Disease Control demonstrated the importance of vaccinations on the popular children's site Whyville and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a virtual island on Second Life where people can explore underground caves or explore the effects of global warming.

The NSA is taking advantage of them all. Human Space Flight Plans Committee , whose goal it is to ensure that the nation is on a vigorous and sustainable path to achieving its boldest aspirations in space. Social networks connect people at low cost; this can be beneficial for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand their contact bases. These networks often act as a customer relationship management tool for companies selling products and services.

Companies can also use social networks for advertising in the form of banners and text ads. Since businesses operate globally, social networks can make it easier to keep in touch with contacts around the world. Applications for social networking sites have extended toward businesses and brands are creating their own, high functioning sites, a sector known as brand networking. It is the idea that a brand can build its consumer relationship by connecting their consumers to the brand image on a platform that provides them relative content, elements of participation, and a ranking or score system.

Brand networking is a new way to capitalize on social trends as a marketing tool. The power of social networks it beginning to permeate into internal culture of businesses where they are finding uses for collaboration , file sharing and knowledge transfer. The term " enterprise social software " is becoming increasingly popular for these types of applications. Many social networks provide an online environment for people to communicate and exchange personal information for dating purposes.

Intentions can vary from looking for a one time date, short-term relationships, and long-term relationships. This usually includes a user's age, gender, location, interests, and perhaps a picture. Releasing very personal information is usually discouraged for safety reasons. Online dating sites are similar to social networks in the sense that users create profiles to meet and communicate with others, but their activities on such sites are for the sole purpose of finding a person of interest to date.

10 Networking Tips That Will Make You A Success

Social networks do not necessarily have to be for dating; many users simply use it for keeping in touch with friends, and colleagues. However, an important difference between social networks and online dating services is the fact that online dating sites usually require a fee, where social networks are free. Many popular online dating services such as Match.

Yet the vast majority of school districts have stringent rules against nearly all forms of social networking during the school day—even though students and parents report few problem behaviors online. Social networks focused on supporting relationships between teachers and their students are now used for learning, educator professional development, and content sharing. HASTAC is a collaborative social network space for new modes of learning and research in higher education, K, and lifelong learning; Ning supports teachers; TermWiki , TeachStreet and other sites are being built to foster relationships that include educational blogs, eportfolios, formal and ad hoc communities, as well as communication such as chats, discussion threads, and synchronous forums.

These sites also have content sharing and rating features. Social networks are also emerging as online yearbooks , both public and private. One such service is MyYearbook , which allows anyone from the general public to register and connect. A new trend emerging is private label yearbooks accessible only by students, parents, and teachers of a particular school, similar to Facebook 's beginning within Harvard.

The use of virtual currency systems inside social networks create new opportunities for global finance. Hub Culture operates a virtual currency Ven used for global transactions among members, product sales [] and financial trades in commodities and carbon credits. The introduction of carbon to the calculation price of the currency made Ven the first and only currency that is linked to the environment. Social networks are beginning to be adopted by healthcare professionals as a means to manage institutional knowledge, disseminate peer to peer knowledge and to highlight individual physicians and institutions.

The advantage of using a dedicated medical social networking site is that all the members are screened against the state licensing board list of practitioners. For alcoholics and addicts, SoberCircle gives people in recovery the ability to communicate with one another and strengthen their recovery through the encouragement of others who can relate to their situation. DailyStrength is also a website that offers support groups for a wide array of topics and conditions, including the support topics offered by PatientsLikeMe and SoberCircle.

Some social networks aim to encourage healthy lifestyles in their users. SparkPeople and HealthUnlocked offer community and social networking tools for peer support during weight loss. Other aspects of social network usage include the analysis of data coming from existing social networks such as Twitter to discover large crowd concentration events based on tweets location statistical analysis and disseminate the information to e. Social networking sites have recently showed a value in social and political movements. Egyptian activists have credited social networking sites with providing a platform for planning protest and sharing news from Tahrir Square in real time.

By presenting a platform for thousands of people to instantaneously share videos of mainly events featuring brutality, social networking can be a vital tool in revolutions. Perhaps the most significant political application of social media is Barack Obama's election campaign in It was the first of its kind, as it successfully incorporated social media into its campaign winning strategy, evolving the way of political campaigns forever more in the ever-changing technological world we find ourselves in today.

His campaign won by engaging everyday people and empowering volunteers, donors and advocates, through social networks, text messaging, email messaging and online videos. In , when Obama first announced his candidacy, there was no such thing as an iPhone or Twitter. However, a year later, Obama was sending out voting reminders to thousands of people through Twitter, showing just how fast social media moves. Obama's campaign was current and needed to be successful incorporating social media, as social media acts best and is most effective in real time.

Building up to the presidential election, it was interesting to see how strong the influence of social media would be following the campaigns, where Obama's winning campaign had been social media-heavy, whereas McCain's campaign did not really grasp social media. JFK was the first president who really understood television, and similarly, Obama is the first president to fully understand the power of social media.

Other political campaigns have followed on from Obama's successful social media campaigns, recognizing the power of social media and incorporating it as a key factor embedded within their political campaigns, for example Donald Trump's presidential electoral campaign, Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's former digital and social media guru, commented that Donald Trump is "way better at the internet than anyone else in the GOP which is partly why he is winning".

Social media is therefore a very effective way in which politicians can connect with a younger audience through their political campaigns. Crowdsourcing social media platform, such as Design Contest , Arcbazar , Tongal , combined group of professional freelancers , such as designers , and help them communicate with business owners interested in their suggestion. This process is often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, and can also occur offline.

There are a number of projects that aim to develop free and open source software to use for social networking services. These technologies are often referred to as social engine or social networking engine software. The following is a list of the largest social networking services, in order by number of active users, as of January , as published by Statista: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the type of service. For the social science theoretical concept of relationships between people, see Social network.

For a list of services, see List of social networking websites. Unauthorized access in online social networks. Use of social network websites in investigations. Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking. Anonymous social media Collective intelligence Comparison of research networking tools and research profiling systems Distributed social network Enterprise bookmarking Gender differences in social network service use Geosocial networking Internet Internet forum Internet think tanks Lateral diffusion List of social networking websites List of virtual communities with more than million users Mass collaboration Mobile social network Personal network Professional network service Online volunteering Social aspects of television Social bookmark link generator Social identity Social media Social network aggregation Social software Social television Virtual community.

The giving loop that feeds computer-mediated social ties". Retrieved April 12, Retrieved July 26, Retrieved October 17, An introduction to the special issue". The challenges and opportunities of social media". Definition, History, and Scholarship". Journal of Computer-mediated Communication.

2) Move Your Desk

The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects. Social media and social justice". The weakness of too many ties". The International Journal on Networked Business. Archived from the original on February 4, Retrieved April 11, Retrieved August 7, Archived from the original on October 1, A Parent's Guide to MySpace.

Definition, History and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. My World Is Cyworld , businessweek. Facebook's social network graphing: Retrieved January 19, Retrieved Nov 27, Archived from the original on August 19, Retrieved September 9, Atlantic Journal of Communication.

Retrieved September 30, Social Science Research Network. Pew Research Center's Journalism Project. Retrieved February 4, Journal of Management Information Systems. Creating and Communicating the Online Self. American Journal of Epidemiology. Motivation, affective consequences, self-esteem, and Facebook fatigue".

Computers in Human Behavior. Retrieved March 17, Retrieved September 10, Retrieved October 26, Retrieved March 13, Marketing Jive, November 18, Organization Science , Vol. Retrieved April 22, Social Network Analysis and Mining Journal. Journal of Translational Medicine. Different Approaches for Different Disciplines". Social network or academic network? Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Disseminating, communicating and measuring scholarship? Age, discipline, audience size and impact". Research in Learning Technology. Retrieved August 8, Retrieved July 16, Retrieved November 7, Journal of Educational Computing Research. Retrieved July 17, Teaching and Teacher Education. National Council of Teachers of English. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management. Archived from the original on September 1, Retrieved September 3, Journal of Information Technical Education. Journal of Media Literacy Education.

Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Archived from the original PDF on October 29, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. Facebook in the College Classroom". The Unharnessed Educational Tool". Can social connectedness be derived online? Facebook might actually be good for you". Success of the National Equality March relied on social media tools".

Retrieved May 2, An excellent first step, backed by research, is to reconnect with old friends: To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my bestselling book here. Okay, but this is supposed to be networking, right? How do you meet new people?

News of the Week: August 4, 2018

Well, that can be crazy simple too. Most people constantly make excuses: Talking to new people makes me break out with hives, boils and open sores. In fact, it can be as simple as moving your desk. He found where the two paths tended to intersect, near the center of the open plan office layout, and took that position as his work location. He attributes much of his subsequent success to that simple move, since it gave him much better access to what was going on in his department.

Not good at going up to new people? For more insights on networking for introverts, click here. But what if we really want to scale this? A disproportionate number of friends and opportunities come your way through a handful of people. Who helped get you your current job? Through whom did you meet the majority of your friends? After you identify your key contacts, think about how you first met them. This column will reveal the brokers in your network and help you see the networking practices you used to connect with them.

All successful people have mentors. But all these meetings might get expensive. And that can lead to second thoughts…. What about making time? Top networker Keith Ferrazzi sums up the answer with the title of his bestseller: You want meetings to be friendly and personal but you also want to lay down the foundation of a relationship that is mutually beneficial. Before you leave any meeting or encounter, you always should ask what I call Three Golden Questions. For more on what to say and do in the moment, click here.

So what should we keep in mind when it comes to being a friend to new people we meet?

1) If Connecting Seems Hard, Start By Re-Connecting

Research shows people evaluate everyone they meet in terms of warmth and competence. And of the two guess which mattered more? Actively showing interest in other people is powerful — and kind. It is engaged, enthusiastic, curious and has supportive nonverbal action.

For more on how being sincere and positive can boost your career, click here. Hey, there were three things: One of the most common problems people have in networking is how to follow up: Great, I met someone. Now what do I do? The answer to that is: Think of the other person first. Corny as it may sound, you should actually do that. For more on the five minute favor, click here. My friend Michael Simmons mentions a great networking method used by none other than Benjamin Franklin. There was somebody who really did not like Ben.

So instead of trying to help his detractor, Franklin took the opposite route — he asked his enemy for a favor. Via The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:.