I had a bit of an email banter with a friend of mine about the benefits of sites such as linkedin.com and now a Caribbean version caribaxispro.com. She said, “You’re going to have to convince me of the benefit in signing up. It requires so much detail which I don’t know why I’d want to store in a public place and for what now?
Good question. Why bother? But if you are having an issue buying into why sites such as linkedin.com is of any use, just ask yourself this one question: Do you see any value in networking with Caribbean and global professionals, within and outside of your industry for the purposes of say - consulting offers, new ventures, expertise requests, business deals, networking, building a reputation in your company and industry?
I personally think that any self-respecting professional and entrepreneur should sign up and work the facilities of sites linkedin.com and Caribaxispro.com. While caribaxispro.com is young and not as heavy with members as yet as linkedin.com, using Linkedin.com can you some great practice and some early success, like I’ve had. . I went in and created a full profile, well 70% complete and because of that I got the opportunity to create, write and edit CaribbeanStartupBlog.com which is a part of a large and fast growing blog network focuses on startups and venture capital with over 100k unique readers monthly. Then I also met Gerd Leonhard who is a very influential blogger and has his own blog mediafuturist.com. And how we found me was by doing a search on LinkedIn.com for Trinidad, which is where he went for a speaking engagement about a few weeks ago, and my named popped up, he checked out this blog siliconcaribe.com emailed me to say how he found me, that he saw we were doing similar things, he emailed to make a connection. I can now move on to grow this relationship in any way I want to. I’ve so bought into Linkedin.com’s tag line- Relationships Matter.
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Hi Folks,
Chike here of CaribbeanAxis.com. Firstly, Silicon Caribe, you’re doing a great job of trendspotting, I read your alerts regularly. Ingrid is right. I’ve been using LinkedIn for years, often not as active as I wish I could be, and while the registration and information sharing can seem tedious, the fundamental value (connecting with other professionals for the purposes of advancing your career) is extremely valuable for anyone who is serious about that.
Caribaxispro.com was created to provide this exact benefit for the Caribbean World because nothing addresses our unique challenges of geographic (and sometimes) cultural fragmentation.
Like any network, the value is compounded by the size of the network and that’s where we need to try to get to, but we hope people agree, that ultimately the value of a Jamaican student or professional, connecting to a potential mentor or employer or business partner who is also of Caribbean descent in Barbados, or Atlanta or wherever can be a game-changer.
Hope more folks get on board with it, but either way hopefully we all agree that whether it’s our service or some other one that comes along, the Caribbean community needs something like this.
Chike
November 18th, 2008 at 11:17 pm