Viadeo Homepage
http://www.viadeo.com/personalinvite/00212an77pm0o5o1 - Join My Viadeo Network in English
Viadeo now has in excess of 1,000,000 members, mostly French speaking, not bad for about two years. There is a strong business focus.
It's not very clear what Viadeo is useful for when you first join. The English part of Viadeo is new, and the networks here, called "hubs" are not populated with many posts. However anyone may form a private hub, and that is a feature that people clearly like. It also means that there are many very small hubs.
Viadeo seems to be a network that business people like. It doesn't require a lot of personal time, because there is no requirement to join hubs. However in the beginning you have to look for people to join your network. Once people have 35 or more connections, they seem to reach a tipping point where the usefulness of those connections becomes apparent. People on Viadeo seem to be very open to invitations to connect.
Use this link: http://www.viadeo.com/personalinvite/00212an77pm0o5o1
Be prepared with a secondary web-mail address. (you@yahoo.com or you@gmail.com for instance.) You need a password of 6 or more characters. You are asked to specify your main activity, or profession. You will add the details of your professional, education and voluntary work, both present and past. It would be good if you could be prepared to enter three of those in the beginning. eg for each one: Your title, the organisation, your responsibilities, start-date and end-date.
Be prepared to enter the details of your education, university, qualifications and dates. Do you know the name and address of the University you attended, including a post code? You need this information to register your school. A fake postcode 000000 works well.
Don't worry. Everything you do can be edited later. The Viadeo interface is quite easy to use if you have some detail. Thinking about it first helps.
The new user screens make it easy to fill in your Viadeo profile if you have the information I suggest above.
You do not have any connections (perhaps one) at this time. Try to change that.
If you are a member of Ryze, Ecademy, or Xing use the names and email addresses of your contacts or friends from those networks to send invitations to join you on Viadeo. Select the "Invite" button that appears on left in a light blue box. Choose "Invite your contacts". You will need the given name, the family name and the email address of the person you are inviting. There is a standard text presented, it's quite a good letter. You might also point them to this file if you found it helpful. the URL is http://www.ate.co.nz/viadeo/
As a new member of Viadeo you can use the system to invite 10 people into your network at any on time. Once you have built your own contacts into your network, do a search using find people. Search for instance for people in your profession or with your interests. You can restrict the search to your country if you choose. If you find someone interesting two or three degrees away from you, ask for a referral.
Click on the "Hubs" tab at the top of the page. At the top right is a box that allows you to choose a country. At the moment in English only the United Kingdom has active networks, and those are just getting established.
There are 341 hubs as I write, but 159 of those are UK Universities. In January 2007 the English Language part of Viadeo was just getting started.
Now you are established on Viadeo you also need to join one of the hubs that has active discussion forums. It's in the process of discussion that you learn who's who and what's going on. This is vital knowledge and it can't be gathered quickly. However once you begin to accumulate that knowledge, the process of discussion helps you make that knowledge part of yourself. The process of discussion empowers you to speak and act effectively, to know the difference between up and down with certainty.
You need to find between 6 and 10 "sources of rich data" which will be the groups that you join. Those groups need not be in social networks, but for newbies, that's the easiest way to find suitable groups.
http://www.ate.co.nz/ryze/index.html - Ryze : The grand-daddy of the social networks.
http://www.ate.co.nz/xing/ - Xing : The favoured network for Europeans.
http://www.ate.co.nz/academici/ - Academici : Especially for academics.
http://www.ate.co.nz/ryze/ - Ryze : My personal Favourite
http://www.ate.co.nz/linkedin/ - LinkedIn : Your Yellow Pages to "Everyone"
To John Stephen Veitch
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Copyright John
Stephen Veitch, 2007
