Develop Your Networking Skills in a Recession

By @Stephen • 15 December 2008 • Filed in: Networking

Jeremiah Owyang says,”It’s official, we’re in a recession… Four quarters since Q4 2007 indicate this economic change and Bloomberg reports that “The U.S. economy may be headed for its deepest and longest recession since World War II”.
In his post Five Ways Web Professionals Should Be Proactive In a Recession Owyang discusses some steps that you can take to prepare and protect yourself:

I’m not all doom and gloom, here’s how you can be proactive, even if you work at a Fortune 100, you are after all, a company of one, so respect yourself and be proactive:

Learn How to Adjust at Your Day Job

I survived 10 rounds of layoffs and was the final 12.5% of Exodus before I went to work at World Savings, what did I do learn? The trick is to stay flexible and demonstrate you can adapt, increase revenues, or use your skills in a scalable and efficient way. You’ll also need to properly internal market your abilities within your corporation or with your clients to demonstrate why you and your services give greater return out the end. Fortunately, the web can be such a tool –if you know how to do it right.

Understand How Social Media is a Risk and Opportunity

Social media has an opportunity in a recession, these tools are cheap, some marketing campaigns range from 10-50k on the low end, far less expensive than any traditional marketing. Of course, with comes great risk: doing it wrong can result in a punking, not doing anything at all could leave you exposed, and most brands overlook the amount of labor required to develop these programs. As a result, I’m working on an upcoming report, and we’re surveying social media marketers to find out if they’re going to increase –or decrease –their social media resources during a downturn. In fact, we’re re jigging some of my research agenda to meet the needs of the market and client –so stay tuned.

Read the rest of “Recession and Human Networking“