Social Networking 101

A comparison of different social networking services can be found in the Wikipedia.

Section 1: Business/Professional Sites

Section 2: Image Sharing Sites

Section 3: Video Sharing Sites

Section 5: Common Interest Sites

Section 6: The Need For A Personal Website

Section 7: Video conferencing and internet phone

Section 1: Business/Professional Sites

Linkedin	Yelp	Blogger	Twitter

* All these sites, if used correctly can help you represent your online persona in a professional manner.

Linkedin is by far the most important professional networking site. Use it! Don’t just create your page, connect with people.

Yelp can be used to boost your online profile, making your mark.

Blogger is a great way to let people know who you are and what you stand for. You can use it to share pictures, review products, places, shows and services.

Twitter is a great short cut for sending links to the other sites. It can let people know what events you have coming up.

Section 2: Image Sharing Sites

Tumblr	Photobucket	Picasa	Facebook

People love to share images.

Tumblr is a cross between a blogging and image sharing.

Photobucket and Picasa both offer free online storage for images. You can then share the images by using url links on other sites.

Facebook is a mixed bag. Travel with care.

Your personal account can have the family pictures, and any questionable items, etc.

I would recommend setting up a professional log on, or a “public figure page” This should not be linked to the other.

Section 3: Video Sharing Sites

(mostly for music)

MySpace

In some business fields it is advantageous to make an share tutorial videos.

Vimeo is probably the most highly thought of currently for professional purposes.

YouTube is very accessible and if you want your videos found more frequently by random users it may be preferable.

MySpace seems to have become the home of bands.

You may find a reason to open a page there is to purely make sure no one else uses your name and bumps up the search with questionable subject matter. You must be careful with MySpace as nothing you put there is ever really deleted. It is the worst for this, perhaps in part to the way it was initially designed.