4Networking magazine: a rare beast
It’s a networking magazine AND it’s a great looking online publication - hats off to the 4N team.
The 4Networking ‘4Community’ magazine is a rare beast - a successful blend of good design, good copy and effective online reading technology.
Worth having a read - and worth checking out 4Networking both on and offline. If you’re new to networking and you want a more relaxed, fun approach to B2B networking, then 4Networking breakfast meetings are a great way to start.
Crashing Facebook
What happens if you have too many friends in the social media?
What happens if you switch on too many cutesy applications in Facebook?
YAAAAGHHH! You repeatedly crash my browser, that’s what!
The famous pink shirt should make this person instantly recognisable to the business networking community.
Has anyone else made themselves practically unavailable as a result of using Facebook to it’s fullest?
We’d love to hear from you 
A1, SAMFUK and my reading glasses…
Congratulations A1 on a nice online forum. Its only been open a few weeks, but its already seen quite a lot of activity. Nice atmosphere, well worth signing up and joining in.
I’ve always been interested in what makes a forum work - or not work. Recently, I’ve been jumping between Sales and Marketing Forum UK - or SAMFUK as I like to call it - and A1. Although SAMFUK’s gone through a considerable makeover recently it still hasn’t achieved the easy readability of A1. The simple result is that I’ve spent far more time recently on A1.
Moving from SAMFUK to A1 is like putting on your reading glasses mid way through trying to text someone. Its only when you’ve done it, you realise how much you were struggling before.
Being right - an obsession
I can’t tell you how many times I find myself sitting bolt-upright, way past midnight, suddenly wondering “Why the hell am I doing this?!”
If I’m really, really honest, a lot of the time I’m probably doing it because I suffer from a need to be right. Right?
Typically in our house it goes like this:
“Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t. This is important!”
“What?”
“I’ve got to finish this post.. it’s…er.. very….”
Clare goes to bed. 60 minutes of furious writing / editing later:
“Why the hell am I doing this?!” [Quits without posting]
Google serves porn to kiddies (allegedly)
So apparently Google’s filtering system went doo-lally and started serving up hard core images on its front page results. I don’t know why anyone is surprised. We create the internet so that anyone can fill it with anything and, in its default mode (i.e. unfiltered) anyone can access anything. Then we get upset when the clunky filtering systems we invent to try to oh, er… stop certain people (i.e. kids) seeing certain things don’t work properly.
What bothers me more is the internet’s underlying ‘pornography’ - its capacity to supply endless, necessarily shallow, amoral, 2-dimensional chunks of increasingly visual material for the pleasurable consumption of everyone from pre-school upwards.
It astonishes me that we’re outraged that Google serves up a jpg of genitalia to our kids but we’re completely comfortable with them spending their lives constructing their self-esteem around how many Bebo friends they have acquired - or them spending hours ‘consuming’ 2-dimensional people on ‘Hot or Not’.
You might think I’m being over the top but if - for a moment - you could stop identifying porn with a ‘thing’ (the picture, the stage show, the DVD, the private shop)- then you could only describe it in terms of what it does to / for people and how we relate to it.
What is porn, then, if we can’t name the ‘thing’ we usually label it as? Its a way of looking; a way of using ‘things’ to feel something; a way of relating to the world. Its a way of representing people and things. How does porn treat people? The portrayed? The consumer? Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Difficult? Deep? Heavy? Yes. The girl on the front page of Hot or Not when I clicked through is there for what reason? To know how hundreds of anonymous viewers will judge her. Her what? Why is she there? To try to build her self-esteem based on how many men find her attractive. How is that different from what we call pornography?
Being vulnerable
An Ecademy blog titled ‘Being vulnerable is good for you…NOT’ prompted me to make the following reply:
“We sometimes talk about vulnerability like its some kind of conscious style decision. ‘Shall I do vulnerable in this or that situation..?’
I prefer to see vulnerability not as a choice but as a consequence of a choice to be open; to be who I am rather than what my ego would prefer others to think I am; to risk being seen; to risk lowering my defenses; to communicate rather than react and create conflict.
To affect ‘vulnerability’ is about as manipulative a strategy as is the deliberate mirroring of body language in order to force ‘rapport’ and influence decisions.
For most people, being invulnerable means hiding behind heavier and heavier armour and striking out before anything or anyone can hurt them. Or hiding from the world in a cocoon of alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, work, anger, relationships… the list goes on.
On that basis, being vulnerable is good for me.”
Successful networking: scientific method or intuitive enterprise?
Life: Scientific Method or Intuitive Enterprise? 
I believe that it’s all Intuitive Enterprise. Even when theory and analysis are at their very best, its at the level of intuition when we synthesise startling new ideas from evidence and observation. I suspect that business management at its very best is the dynamic, in-the-moment opportunism that comes from lived experience and qualities like courage, generosity and passion.
The worst of business and science is a barren terrain of jargon, dogma, masks, labels and hierarchies that offers protection for those for whom emotion and feeling are a difficult - or often painful - experience. In this place, that which cannot be measured (intuition and emotion) has become not only worthless, but dangerous.
I’ve learned that the more I trust, honour and act on what we call ‘instinct’ (the un-measurable, un-nameable sum total of all my experiences, feelings and observations), the better results I achieve and the more interesting my life is. The less we honour that un-measurable component, the less we can ever understand the real driving force behind customer experience and buying decisions - let alone how people interact in the workplace.
Facebook suicide
22.00 Monday. I removed myself from facebook. For good. I wiped myself out, wondering as I did how I would vanish from my friends’ ‘friends’ list. Would I just not be there? Would my picture fade (like in ‘Back to The Future’)? Would I crumble into ash at the bottom of the browser window? Or would I stay there, mute and unreachable?
I’d only been on a few weeks and only had 18 or 19 friends, but in that short time, I had grown very uncomfortable with the vortex that is facebook. Hungry, needy, demanding is how it felt to me and I’m quite relieved to be out of it.
G2B@ business networking podcast featured on Make Your Mark blog
This week our G2B@podcast (the first - and so far only - business networking podcast for Devon and Cornwall or anywhere for that matter!) was featured on the Make Your Mark blog.
We’re 12 weeks old this week and it’s been a great experience so far.
The Hub - a great example of free business networking
Last Thursday saw me give a 35 minute talk about podcasting to The Hub business network in Cornwall. The venue was the Maritime Museum in Falmouth and it was the first time I’d been to a Hub event - and the first time we’d been to the Museum too. Both were excellent. There were about 60+ people at the event (a great turn out for an event so far South) and the Museum, overlooking the Marina as night fell, was a spectacular venue.
The Hub do free business networking very well. They get sponsorship from a few key businesses to pay for food, wine and venue hire and it’s free to the public. A very simple, effective model where everyone wins. The picture, btw, is of me setting up 45 minutes before people arrived. Honestly 
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