Traditionally, the best way to sell to future prospects was by shopping around the recommendations of previous employers. There’s nothing wrong with that strategy, but clients may be skeptical because you control who is providing testimonials, not people they already know and trust.

GigPark means to bring word-of-mouth recommendations to the web, using a social network model. You can browse existing recommendations just by visiting the site, but the innovative twist offered by GigPark comes into play when you register an account with the site.

Once you have a profile, you can mine your existing social networks and email address books to see if any of your friends are already using GigPark. The site is relatively new, so trawling my Facebook, Hotmail, and Twitter contacts actually didn’t result in any hits.

That said, the folks behind the site are trying to promote growth. You can invite your friends from the site using their emails, and if you register and make three recommendations before the end of the month, you’re automatically entered into a draw to win an iPhone 3G.

Whether or not you have any friends, you can browse the community recommendations. The listings are also searchable, so that you can find exactly what you’re looking for. You can even recommend individual items, like blog posts. Using the “Ask” link, you can also seek out specific professionals or services, and broadcast those to your Facebook, email, etc. contacts from GigPark.

If you’re a service provider, it’s a simple, free way to spread the word, provided you have clients willing to sign up and make recommendations. Another option for those with businesses is to create a Business Profile, which adds information about your business to your basic account. This is a free upgrade, so there’s no reason not to do it if you provide any kind of goods or services.

Once you’ve established a business profile, you can request recommendations using an email form, Facebook, or Twitter from within GigaPark. Recommendations you receive will be stored on your publicly accessible GigPark business page, for which you receive a unique URL that you can include in your email signature, etc.

GigPark is definitely a service to watch, since it starts where you already are, leveraging the power of your existing social networks in a convenient, user-friendly way. If it can gain some momentum, it could become a valuable web working resource indeed.

How do you choose service providers, doctors, handymen, etc. now? Do you think a GigPark-style social model would simplify this task?

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My Twitter Page

Like anyone using social networks for my work, I struggle with the friend feature. There are a number of theories of how and why to friend other people and when to accept friend requests. Clearly, having more “friends” on your social networks has its benefits, but if friending is done randomly, how much value are those very random “friends” for your business goals?

Some of the reasons you might want to friend someone for your work are:

• facilitating business networking
• connecting to a potential strategic partner or virtual team member
• looking for a job opportunity
• building an audience for the content you publish
• cultivating potential customers and clients

To Follow or Not To Follow

Accepting friend offers often seems to be much less strategic. On Twitter, for example, I personally don’t follow every single person who follows me. I do go to each Twitter page for every person who does follow me and peruse a few pages of their tweets. I can tell pretty quickly if they are using Twitter in a way that is valuable or meaningful and worth following. I follow less people because I really want to pay attention to the people I do follow.

Some people automatically follow every single person who follows them. To me, the peril of doing this is that some people who follow you are either doing it randomly or are spam-following so you end up following a lot of flotsam and jetsam and unless you have time to weed out the noise, you end up with an untenable Twitter account. But then again, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.

If you are following everyone you can in the hopes of building up your “captive” audience, I think that comes with the risk of having a lot of people following you back who really aren’t interested in what you are doing or what you have to say. I think when you look at someone with 9000 followers on Twitter, it looks impressive, but when they are following 8700 people in return, you begin to wonder how many of those people following them are really paying attention.

That said, there is the theory that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, it is an insult. Some people actually send messages to say “I’m no longer going to follow you because you never followed me.” I’m stunned by that attitude but only because when I go out to follow someone, my intention is purely that I see value in what they are doing online and would like to pay attention. If they follow me back, that’s gravy. If they are one of the biggies – the Guy Kawasakis, Chris Brograns, CC Chapmans of the world – then that is icing on the cake (although some of them have their account set up to auto-follow all followers). But if they don’t follow me, I think either they are just being discriminating with who they follow or they are too busy to keep up with all the follows.

Having more followers who are paying attention can be a real boon to business. Just this week, I was making a presentation at a conference and during the break, brought up my blog to show in the second half of my presentation. Suddenly, music began playing on a loop in the background. I couldn’t figure out where in the world it was coming from because I definitely had not intentionally placed a music player on my blog.

I quickly Twittered a plea for help and half a dozen people immediately came to my rescue, literally checking my blog code line by line to help me figure out where the offending music player was located so I could delete it. It turns out the music was playing out of a Slide.com gallery I had posted a few weeks back. I quickly deleted the slideshow and voila! The music was gone, and I was able to demo my Utterli audio podcast from my blog page.

Facebook Friending

Believe it or not, I was a Facebook resistor. You can go back into my Twitter tweet archive and see how strongly I resisted joining Facebook or using it when I joined. When I finally gave in, I was still stymied by how it worked and why everyone seemed obsessed with it. Then I began getting friend invites from friends from high school and college as well as former work colleagues and people who used to work for me at my Internet company back in the 90s. Real connections were being made.

Then I began to get random friend requests from people who I didn’t know. But Facebook has that handy feature to show you what friends you have in common. To this day, I still will not accept totally random friend requests on Facebook unless

a. we have some real friends in common, or

b. their profile is really interesting to me in some way.

Interesting, of course, is subjective. For me, as I try to keep Facebook at least 75% professional and 25% personal, interesting means they are doing interesting work, working at an interesting company or are friends with colleagues who I admire and enjoy working with.

On the flip side, if they are Second Lifers, than I accept their friend invites almost every time because I’m always looking to grow my Second Life network.

Friends Are In The Eye of the Beholder

Ultimately, each person has their own “Friend Meter” and their own “Friending Tolerance.” I am not judging whatever friending methodology anyone chooses for themselves. To me, friending needs to be the right balance of serendipity and strategy. I can’t say I’ve perfected my friending process, but I’m pretty comfortable with how and why I friend others and which friend invites I’ll accept.

How do you determine who to friend on social networks? How do you decide which friend invites to accept?

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