Adapt to Experience

Xing for Newbies

By John S Veitch

About Xing

Xing is not the most easy business networking site to use. But if you want to connect to people in Europe this is the place to be. With the recent change of name and a site upgrade, some of the usability issues will have been addressed.

Xing is proving to be very popular with European people and many South Americans. This site is providing serious opposition to Ryze. Having the advantage of being second, many of the same functions that Ryze offers are better executed in Xing.

Xing is three years old. There are now several hundred discussion networks, but the discussion has not taken off on most of them yet. Support is offered for several languages. (16 I'm told)

To encourage group use, 5 recent postings to groups are listed on the front page. You can open up a page for more of these recent postings (More) and quickly find the topics that might interest yourself. You can read any of these letters. If you want to reply you must join the group. (A simple click in most cases)

Would you prefer an Invitation?

If you would like me to invite you to join Xing please send an email to john.s.veitch at gmail dot com
Put "Invitation to Xing Please" in the subject line, and your name in the body of the message. I'll try to oblige withing 24 hours.

Preparation Beforehand

You can upload a photograph and a gif or jpg file about 150px by 180px would be ideal.

You have a great deal of freedom on your personal web page to be very creative.

First Steps

Most of your personal data is entered into pre-prepared data fields. There are lots of them. Go to your "Start Page".

Open "Edit Profile"
Business DetailsYou record your present business details, and previous firms you have worked for. Your professional qualifications. Your current interests.
Contact Data Formal name if required, postal address , several phone numbers if you choose, your email address. (I suggest you use a secondary address, gmail or yahoo for instance.)
Web Skype name. Chat names for several networks. Blog and personal homepage URL's.
About Me This page accepts HTML, but not a full set of tags. You have some flexibility to build this page as you choose.

Open "Settings"
Notifications This is a list of common email messages Xing uses. You can choose to have them on or off. I suggest you turn them "ON". If one of them becomes a nuisance, come back and turn that ONE "off". The infrequent messages are very valuable, they remind you of things you'll forget otherwise.
Privacy There are lots of options here in the new Xing set-up. Too many. Frankly you don't need to shut people out. My suggestion is that you turn it all on. If you are the Prime Minister, or a senior public official, or a famous person, you may have a different need, but most of us don't have that problem.
Languages There are 16 languages supported by Xing.

Open the "Membership" tab. You will see here the status of your current membership.

Using Xing

On your Start Page you can see if there are messages in your inbox, if anyone wants to contact you, a list of five people who are usually "close" to you, and a list of five people who are friends of friends. There is also a list of recent letters posted to Xing. Finding topics there that interest you, is a great way to start using Xing, and to find some groups that you should join.

When you view "My Profile" you see the business details on top, contact details, your personal web page, your "about me" page and your guestbook recorded on successive "tabbed pages". If your guest book is missing, you didn't turn it on. Go back to "settings" and to "privacy" and turn it on.

Making contact with people is simplified. You write a one short comment to the person you want to contact. They can choose to accept or reject the contact. You can write "tags" to identify and mark anyone you contact on Xing. That's a very valuable feature. You should use it.

You are free to explore the many new Groups on Xing. You have to join a group to contribute to the conversation, but you can read most groups without joining.

The main tabs at the top of the Xing Start page are Members, Messages, Address Book, Groups and Events. (Also Premium World, but maybe only for paying members) The use of these tabs is obvious enough once you open them.

I find that compared with Ryze the discussion on Xing flows less well. A key reason for that may be that so many people are writing in their second or third language to write in English. Xing certainly makes you aware that this is a multi-lingual world. Some people may not like that in the beginning, but it's good for us to experience that. Mind broadening.

If you've joined Xing you should also be a member of LinkedIn. You can find out about being a Newbie at LinkedIn here. http://www.ate.co.nz/linkedin/

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