Liz Lynch's Goldmine of a site

by Byron Woodson II

I heard of the book Smart Networking by Liz Lynch somewhere, and recently. The other day, I also happened upon this post by Liz Lynch on one of the blogs I follow, the personal branding blog. I tend to be somewhat lukewarm about that blog because its filled with guest posts that are not always what I'm looking for. Don't get me wrong, when the info is good, it's great, like the post I'm blogging about here (hence great).

Anyway, I went to Liz Lynch's website and was surprised and delighted at it. It had a very professional feel to it. What I really liked, though, was a quick test that anyone could take to rate themselves as a professional networker.

I also liked how it addressed the two main networking sites: Facebook for social networking and LinkedIn for professional networking. What I liked in the questionnaire was that it didn't exactly preach how you should think of them. It simply asked a question. This 'what do you think?' and 'how do you use' was a refreshing break from the 'think this/do this' approach that many people try to force down your throats.

Besides that specific question, the self-rating questionnaire was a good way to assess not openly what you think about networking, and how you network in specific, but what you do as a networker.

I took the test and got a relatively good score, I was second from the top spot. The fault I had was that I'm still not as comfortable doing the direct professional networking, as in trying to extract value from my network, but I do try to contribute a lot.

I really liked the self-rating survey. I am soo going to steal it for my own personal use. It's a good tool for me, or anyone, to constantly update how effective they are at networking. When taking it, I realized that a lot of the assumptions for the survey were the me-centered networking that I think is a little over-done. I think I'll build a questionnaire that gets to the heart of not just building a network, but weaving a network around you.