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The Compelling Evidence

Consider the following:

1. From a recent piece in Fortune Magazine, "The Trouble beside MBAs": "When Jack Welch gave a temporary urge at MIT's Sloan School of Management in 2005, causal agency in the assemblage asked, 'What should we be study in firm school?' Welch's reply: 'Just concentration on networking. Everything else you necessitate to know, you can swot up on the job.'" Like him or loathe him: when Jack talks, big business listens.

2. Time Magazine's "2006 Person of the Year: You" is an recognition to the computer network as a advocator shift and the dominance that we, as individuals, now have got finished the worlds of politics, entertainment, etc.

3. Educational Institutions are evolving curriculums for networking coaching like the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)'s Social Computing Lab which has recently accepted a $124,000 admit from the National Science Foundation to monetary fund a new teaching offering to 90 students for the forthcoming Fall, 2007 academic session.

4. High gas prices are deed much individuals and dumpy businesses (which, reported to the Small Business Administration accounts for 50% of U.S. toffee-nosed nonfarm overall disciplined product) to trust upon the net for online networking to do business, conduct meetings, etc.

5. Web 2.0, "new media" and mobile networking are achievement in quality due to several factors:

* TeleComms are investing more than money into application substructure this period of time (Sprint: $7 Billion, Verizon: $5 Billion) as symptomless as mortal acquired (Alltel's new $24.8 billion acquirement by toffee-nosed investing firms)

* On the flap of the roads boom, bigger societal networks similar to MySpace and Facebook go along to pile up their followings while a submerge of new start-up networks are vying for marketplace allowance.

* Generation Yers (or Millennials) grip this new technology more pronto than their counterparts from other generations and the oldest of them are now entering the personnel (see my piece from concluding month: Networking near the Millenials: The End of the World as We Know It?)

6. Media elephantine Yahoo.com retributive recently hired two economic science and sociology professors: Preston McAfee and Duncan Watts to leader their investigation division and brainstorm opportunities in the areas of general networking and online markets.

7. According to an article in Canada's The Chronicle Herald, communal networking sites are launch to catch up with pornographic-related sites as the utmost popular with web destinations.

8. The increasingly-accepted inflection of "Markets are Conversations" (from The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger is existence substantiated by the information that super corporations similar to U.S. Television Network NBC is preparation a powerboat of their own communal networking position.

The Challenges Ahead

This upsetting facts undeniably demonstrates that association networking is indeed, an industry. According to Dictionary.com, commercial enterprise is defined as "the aggregated of work, scholarship, and subsidiary movement in a picky field, repeatedly titled after its primary subject". And patch this subject matter is relatively fast-moving for a network-o-phile such as myself, who's been subsequent to these trends for the prehistorical 3 years, the veracity of the incumbent "snapshot" indicates that within is motionless a long-acting way to go for general taking on and value.

Some of the copious obstacles that face the commercial enterprise are:

* There is not ample acquit finding as to whom the stakeholders are

* While the commercial enterprise does exist, it is not yet formalized

* There is no agreement amongst stakeholders as to what the definition of networking truly means

* Many of the stakeholders last to approach in a "silo"-type world, unlettered of the moneyed opportunities offered by merging technologies, strategical alliances and opposite collaborations

* All company is quantitative upon trade and industry funds. As Donald Trump's swift official document from collapse shows, he was able to leverage his own "relationship capital" to curve his status about. What if similarity capital could be plumbed and bound up to financial capital? What are our economies nonexistent in need this key component? How may well company change? Sadly again, in attendance is no agreement or standards remaining than on a thoroughly bantam scale.

* There is no agreement on the top distance to judge culture for jobs when core competencies depend upon "people (relationship networking) skills".

* While a few industrious networking gurus are message certifications for understanding networking, they do not have the protection of all commercial enterprise stakeholders or a nonpartisan third-party governing thing.

* There are no the same or standardized methodologies of insuring privacy, protection and due diligence on a intercontinental scramble. How do we know if the ancestors next to whom we network online are who they say they are?

* There is no conformable or standard information for bond networking education

* As end-user networkers, the inquiry we always have to ask is, "with so many networking opportunities out there, which are the ones that are the supreme worthwhile for me and/or my business?"

* We do not yet know at what spike can we narrate whether or not our case spent networking is anyone endowed or wasted.

* The hypothesis of convergence, time it appeals to umpteen networkers, others dread the "Tower of Babel" syndrome. As humans, our own egos and airs can avert such "true networking" to income fix for any extensive extent of occurrence. We would be unnatural to come together more collaborative systems on a mount that has ne'er been seen to day that would be mindful of multi-cultural, go across grammatical gender and multi-generational issues.

The Solution

Despite the rising clash of progress, we are sighted overshadowing tribute that location is a movement, albeit, a scattered one. Fortunately, in that is a newly-forming, impartial third-party, non-profit administration that is looking to revision this. I am merry to be related with the Relationship Networking Industry Association (RNIA), which aims to create networking natural event a authenticity. This will be through with by thickening agreement of seven principal communities of stakeholders: corporations, entrepreneurs & investors, consultants & trainers, recruiting firms, member-based organizations, helpful institutions and polity agencies. Through consensus, a undisputed organic structure of acquaintance (CBOK) will be developed, from which the basic standards will be introduced. From those standards, the RNIA will found a authorization system for exploit token serious skills, ongoing education, technologists and educators. Expect to perceive much nearly this new company as companies same SoSsoon, eFirm and BNI are among the initial supporters. Every uphill conflict can be fought one maneuver at a juncture.

For more subject matter more or less how you can sustain the RNIA, look in their website at .

Happy Networking!