New York SBDC Research Network

Interested in networking and learning from others? Tuesday is CX Day, a day full of live and online events devoted to learning from customer service innovators and sharing strategies. So whether you need help justifying the importance of customer service training or just need to sharpen your company's customer service skills, there's something for you. View a full list of live and online CX Day events at: cxday

Last night I attended an event hosted by the Albany Business Journal . The Biz Mix was a networking opportunity that brought together individuals from all types of business throughout the Capital Region. The Albany Business Journal is an American City Business Journal , the nation's largest publisher of metropolitan business newspapers. ACBJ's metropolitan business newspapers reach 4 million readers each week with exclusive, in-depth coverage of their business communities. Every day I recieve emails from the Albany Business Journal that keep me informed about local and national business news. ACBJ operates in 42 metropolitan areas throughout the U.S. and the websites associated with the 42 journals reach 8 million unique monthly visitors. I also recieve invitations to events like the one I attended last night, which provide a great forum to meet other business indivduals in the community. I highly recommend to any business individual to check out their local business jou

Facebook is not just a virtual community for friends; it has evolved into a networking utility for businesses and professionals. Today, there are over 175 million active users on Facebook with the fastest growing group of users those 30 years and older. College graduates and young professionals, the original target audience of Facebook when it launched in 2004, are now using the site to foster professional growth. Should your business create a Facebook Page and join this growing online community? Below are some thoughts about businesses on Facebook: Ten Reasons to Use Facebook for Business Facebook caters to a diverse audience including professionals and businesses. It is a free online tool to facilitate networking with professionals and businesses. 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook This blog provides a list of the applications available on Facebook and how businesses may be able to use the applications for their business needs. Should your business be on Facebook? “The secret is

Sharing your best pics Beautifully crafted cabinets, comical before and after plumbing or electrical shots, clothing, jewelry, interesting photographs of anything - this is an opportunity to be creative and show the beauty in daily life. While you cannot use Flickr to advertise your business, you can still use it to store and share photographs. And like LinkedIn, and Facebook, it is another social networking resource. Build a repository of photos to share with colleagues or the world at large and you can decide who can see which photos. Label them with your website name and without screaming your message, you can still show your stuff. In this situation, less is definitely more. But check out Flickr and just browse and see the beautiful and interesting things you can see.

For those of your clients who would like to make and maintain contact within their industry but may feel a bit out of place in Facebook or MySpace, the social network arena still appears to be narrowing to a few main players. As much as people who write about these products often make it sound like there is only one reasonable choice: theirs; I'll be interested to see what lasts in the long run and becomes the standard. Will it play out that this is something we really need or will social network sites never replace the usual ways we keep in touch and make new contacts? It seems that whatever social networking program used has to come out of email. It seems silly to me to have to read my email to tell me to go to Facebook to read the message. What for? It has to be integrated - I have enough stuff to check up on with multiple email addresses. I was not aware of VisiblePath but now it sounds like a good solution. www.Jigsaw.com Jigsaw is an online directory of business people who