(the mash) Lets not also forget about bandwidth usage that could strain a company’s network. Within ScanSafe’s own clientèle, about 32% of its customers block access to social networks, with MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn being the networks that are being blocked the most.

Is your company blocking you from social networks? If so, you might want to consider doing your social networking from home. You really don’t need to spend more than an hour a day networking any way. Thirty minutes before you leave the house each day and thirty minutes in the evening should be enough to send messages and respond to others, add friends to your network, and browse for new and interesting items. Whether you prefer Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, networking is a useful activity, but your company has legitimate security concerns. If networking is an absolutely essential activity for your position then maybe you can talk to your boss about having a dedicated workstation just for social networking.

If your company has several employees who need to network as a part of their duties, perhaps you could set up a workstation just for social networking and make it a shared workstation. Schedule the time for each employee who must use that network and protect that workstation with its own firewall, shutting off access to the rest of your company’s network and resources. Unless your employees need those while networking, that workstation doesn’t need to be tied in to everything else and by cutting it off from the network you maintain your security.

Reputation management is one of those things that everyone online needs to think about. Without a reputation management strategy, you may find yourself in the throes of a heated battle that gets out of hand. I’ve seen it happen to others and it could happen to you too.

When you do business online, you are bound to make enemies. In fact, even off line, enemies can hurt your business. The off line world has built-in protections, though, for slander and libel that may not be applicable online. That’s because it so easy for people to put up a website in a fake name and remain anonymous even while they slander you and ruin your good reputation.

Online, the battle over reputation management is to have more positive comments about you than negative comments. For that reason, I recommend being in as many places as you can, posting, making friends, and building your online reputation – one network, one click, and one relationship at a time. Here are some tools to help you do that:

• Social networks like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook. Don’t just join one. Join as many as you can, and stay active.
• Social bookmarking. Again, use as many social bookmarking sites as you can and make sure that you bookmark other people’s web pages as well as a few choice ones of your own. Social bookmarking is another form of networking.
• Forums. Join a few forums and stay active in those as well.
• Blogging. You should own at least one blog, but don’t just rely on that. Visit a few other people’s blogs too and comment on them.
• Article marketing. Write articles and distribute them online to as many article directories as you can.
• Websites. Own some. Preferably more than one. Get your name on them so your reputation is positive.

To manage your reputation online you need to be in as many places as you can be. Often. Meet people, build relationships, and keep your commitments.

Another LinkedIn item of interest:

(Source) This Friday, professional social network LinkedIn will provide the ability to add a photo to your profile page. It’s clearly a move that aims to keep up with Facebook, which increasingly looks set to steal LinkedIn’s audience.

I don’t know that we should set this up as a competition between Facebook and LinkedIn, though. Studies have shown that networkers who include photos in their profiles, no matter which social network they are a part of, do better overall than networkers who don’t. That is, they get more friends requests, join more groups, and get more of their own requests answered. People like to see who they’re networked with. That’s just human nature.

That isn’t to say there aren’t good reasons for not having a photo. Maybe you value your privacy. I know I certainly do. But when it comes to networking and growing a business through your social networks, it pays to include a photo. I think the folks at LinkedIn realize that and are ready to give that benefit to their users. At any rate, I think it’s a good move.

Care to get linked in to Jessica Biel? Well, now you can.

The star has set up a LinkedIn profile, a very popular social networking site for business leaders. I like LinkedIn. Here’s why:

As opposed to other social sites, LinkedIn tends to skew to a wealthier demographic, with executives from all 500 of the Fortune 500, an average annual household income of approximately $139,000, and more than 1,500 C-level business leaders.

If this is the segment of the market that you target your services to then you’d likely benefit from a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a lot better for traditional businesses and Web 2.0 businesses that follow the traditional model than either Facebook or MySpace, which tend to work better for high school and college students, musicians and other creative types, and the lower to middle socioeconomic classes.

It’s not that you can’t make business work at MySpace and Facebook. You can. But you have to know your market and if the market is right for you to be there then you should be. I like LinkedIn because the market there is right for me.

Rumors have it that Microsoft is trying to get a leg in at Facebook.

Facebook and Microsoft already have a relationship that allows Microsoft to advertise on Facebook.

Yesterday, Marketing Pilgrim reported:

Further rumors state that Google may also be looking to purchase a stake in the social network.

Could this be a set up to a tug of war between the two search engines? Can they both have stake in Facebook or would that pose a conflict of interest for Facebook? Would the quality of the site as a networking tool decline?

Personally, I think it Google is involved it can only be a plus. Microsoft, I’m not so sure about.