Almost everybody is talking about Social networking. They're talking on how social networking sites will help them generate a lot of traffic, visitors and most valuable thing--SALES!

What I want to start from this today's article is by asking you a simple question "Is social networking important for business?" There generally seem to be three reactions to social networking from businesses:

A) Ban it

B) Embrace it

C) Ignore it

Sometimes businesses try a combination of the above in relation to different sites (they might ban Facebook and YouTube, embrace LinkedIn and ignore Twitter entirely) but misunderstanding their effectiveness can be perilous. So, the question is, How to Do it Right?

There's a social networking of giving your business cards to a lot of people, signing up on cocktail parties, making friends to a lot of people from Facebook, counting how many people follow you in Twitter etc. To me, these are worthless! It's worthless in the real world. It's worthless in the online world. The social networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. By doing it reliably and repeatedly so that in the future time people may be interested helping you achieve your goals.

You can do that offline, by helping, referring and teaching people. And of course, you can do it online, by leading a group, connecting people, by giving to people access to resources that they need because in due time they'll do the same for you. Remember, you're not doing it because doing it is so beneficial.

What I really don't like in the online world is the superficial networking--making friends to everybody. You don't have to befriend everybody else, you should ask yourself this question "Why?". It doesn't count for anything. It's just a waste of time.