It’s been a while since I was first involved in the business social networks stuff; I think it was late 2004 when I subscribed to this new service named Linkedin which aim was to store and improve your network of people.

It was love at first sight and helped me finding some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. It was also a chance for my first appearance on a national magazine (it was Class Magazine, if I remember well) in an article on the usage in business environments of this new thing named “social networks”.

I then helped BJ Fogg with my contributions to the designing of the user interfaces and of the interactions of a different type of (then) business social network (centred on the voice interaction between users of the same community) named YackPack.

And then came Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and all the rest of the family; and today – if you live in Italy or can read Italian – the book written by my dear friend Roberto Marmo “Promuoversi con i business social network” (Promote yourself using business social networks) with all the how-to’s, the do’s and don’ts for the main social networks here around.

Roberto asked me to write a little paper on my BSN usage strategies that you can find in the book and that I summarize here below:

• the number of your contacts doesn’t makes any difference. It’s the quality of your relationships that matters;
• be methodic: every new relationship has to become a new contact in your network;
• don’t be shy: ask to your contacts for help if you need it in your business;
• be unprejudiced: I’ve dropped some magic in the first email I used to contact Keith Ferrazzi, the guru of social networking. And he replied! (note to self: need to create a dedicated post on this anytime soon)