Over the years, I’ve observed that there is a common set of behaviors that is part of what makes people successful in business that I think of as the rules of service. The most successful companies actual incorporate these rules into their corporate culture.

Here they are:

Rule #1 – The customer always comes first

Rule #2 – Your network (business) is your first customer

Rule #3 – You are the most important customer in your network (business)

These are very much part of the western culture, and parts of these are taught to us as we are growing up. For me though, there were subtleties in these rules that took me years to learn, and I’m still learning to apply.

Let’s look at the rules in more detail, starting with the last one.

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Beatles · Business · Customer · Customer service · God · Golden Rule · Marianne Williamson · Nelson Mandela

Since I’ve been blogging for a couple of months now, I have friends who are asking me “how do you blog?”.

Seems like a simple enough question, so I figured I’d blog about it (seems a little redundant blogging about blogging, but here goes). (more…)

Blog · Blogger (service) · Internet hosting service · Paul Stamatiou · Tools · TypePad · Uniform Resource Locator · WordPress

I recently ran across a post by Michelle Hancock on LinkedIn and noticed that she had her email address showing right below her name. I sent her a LinkedIn message asking her how she did that, and she kindly replied that I could call her and she’d walk me through the process.

As it turns out, all she did was to append the email address to the end of the field for her last name.

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Business · Email · Email address · Facebook · GMail · LinkedIn · Mail · Twitter

I was talking with the recruiter who got me my job at Quovera (formerly Millenia Vision) about why she has the text “{LION}” after her name. She explained to me that it’s an acronym that is for people who practice “open” networking.

I did some searching, and found this site at http://www.themetanetwork/ which appears to be the basis of the LinkedIn Open Networking Community, and signed up.  There was a form to fill out that told about my current networking level on LinkedIn, and finally I got told that I’d go through an approval process.

Once I got the approval email, I was asked to complete my profile. Interestingly the profile on this site has forms for all sorts of other networking profile sites in additon to the ones I’ve seen before (and mentioned in prior posts to this blog). So I’ve filled that in as best I can, and we’ll see …

There are just way too many places on the web that try to help you with networking for any of them to be very valuable. LinkedIn seems to have kept a solid focus and finally seems to have a high penetration after all these years. If only it could keep my address book up to date ….

I just ran across a great post (actually a friend posted the link on Facebook) on social networking called “The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook” by Tamar Weinberg that gives you lots of good ideas on the do’s and don’ts of social networking. Highly recommended for newbies like me trying to figure this stuff out.

Facebook · LinkedIn · LinkedIn Open Networker · Online Communities · social network · Social network service · Tamar Weinberg · Twitter

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen businesses make over the years is to lose focus on what made them successful in the first place.

Over the last year or so I’ve become more disappointed with Plaxo. They seem to have forgotten that their key differentiation in the market was the way that they helped you keep your address book (and calendar) up to date, and secondarily to keep multiple services in synch.

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Address book · Comcast · Excite · Google · Plaxo · social network · Social network service · Yahoo