The Social Network That Gets Down to Business

 Joanna Wiseberg began Red Scarf Equestrian, which makes stylish handbags and other luxury goods for horse lovers, two years ago, just as the economy plunged into recession.

Nevertheless, Ms. Wiseberg was soon meeting people who invited her to showcase her goods at elite places like the Cannes Film Festiva;, the Monaco Grand Prix and a luxury goods conference in China. Now, she said, Red Scarf Equestrian, based in Toronto, is poised to take off.

“My business is a niche within a niche, and I opened at the worst possible time,” Ms. Wiseberg said. “You try and push a ball uphill.”

Her tool was LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals that is often perceived as a workaday cousin to the social butterfly of Facebook. But as Ms. Wiseberg discovered, LinkedIn is actually more than just a place for job seekers to post a résumé. “I wouldn’t be here without LinkedIn,” she said.

For any company in the social networking business, it is not easy living in the shadow of Facebook and Twitter. With 500 million users connecting with friends, trading photos, videos and articles, or whiling the time away on social games, Facebook has pretty much locked up the field. For its part, Twitter has carved a solid niche for those interested in broadcasting their thoughts 140 characters at a time.

But with its unabashed utilitarian bent, LinkedIn has built a presence in social media. Anyone with a career, a business or ambitions to climb the corporate ladder can network with 75 million people who use it, in large part, to find jobs or to recruit candidates for jobs.

But in the last year or so, LinkedIn has been offering plenty of information and tools that can help its users, whether they work for themselves or at a company, to conduct research, find new customers and expand their business contacts and prospects. Much of it remains free, though some advanced features require a subscription of $25, $50 or $100.

For the LinkedIn novice, the first step is to create a profile, which is much like putting together a résumé listing education, professional experience and skills. But the online profile is different from a printed résumé.

For example, putting more content, rather than less, will make your profile more likely to come up in searches. That means listing not just major positions you’ve had, but also minor internships and summer jobs. And it means listing all the skills you have. Change the privacy settings to be as open as possible; if you are looking for work, you want strangers to find you.

Next, it is good to have other people vouch for you. You ask people you know to write brief recommendations that also appear in your profile. A little logrolling never hurts. Recommend people you know as they may be more inclined to return the favor.

Then network as if LinkedIn were a big industry trade show. Search for people you know and invite them to be part of your network. Regular users of LinkedIn say a common mistake that newcomers make is to limit their network. So how many is enough?

There are no absolutes, but Krista Canfield, a LinkedIn spokeswoman, says that 35 connections appears to be the minimum to make the viral properties of social networks truly useful. (As in any network, you don’t want to include people who could drag down your reputation. LinkedIn lets you deflect unwanted invitations with the Archive button so no one knows they have been rejected by you.)

Once you’ve gone this far, it is easy to look for jobs using the company’s search tools. But there are plenty of other ways to use it to help your job search or other business aspirations.

Perhaps the most useful places to look are the million or so company pages LinkedIn has compiled. The pages will reveal the names of people who were recently hired or left the company, as well as those who have changed positions within the company.

Not only will you be able to pinpoint the right person, you will be able to see all the people who are in your network — your direct connections and their connections — who are somehow affiliated with that right person inside a company. I thought I hardly knew anyone at Oracle, for example, and found that 245 people in my network either work there now or have worked there in the past — all potentially useful contacts if I were looking for a job there.(New York Times)

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Hints Of Change In The World Monetary System

Ever since its inception 66 years ago, the International Monetary Fund has fancied itself at the center of the global economy.


But only now does the prospect of a multilateral monetary authority providing stability to the international financial system seem even remotely possible. That's because for the first time in decades there are legitimate uncertainties surrounding the one institution that does play that role: the U.S. dollar.
In that context, a couple of recent IMF-related announcements are more important than they normally would be.

On Monday, the IMF said it would dramatically increase lending to a wide array of developing countries through a new "precautionary credit line" under which they would pre-qualify for loans to be drawn upon in a crisis.

Then on Tuesday, South Korea, which will host the Group of 20 nations summit in November, said it would no longer keep its proposal for a global system of currency swaps on the agenda of that meeting. Instead, it would seek a new role for the IMF for containing global financial turmoil--in effect, endorsing the IMF's alternative plan for a "global stabilization mechanism," which would be available to groups of countries.

Whether there is support from either the developing world or the G-20 for these two ideas remains to be seen. There is still a stigma associated with borrowing from the IMF, as much as the Fund is trying to break it down. And the U.S., the only country with veto power on the IMF board, might resist reforms that could in some way weaken the power-broking influence that the current system affords it whenever crises erupt.

But the balance of power in the global economy is shifting, with Emerging Asia growing at almost double-digit rates while the economies of the U.S. and Europe are mired in post-crisis debt. The fact that these proposals are coming forward is an indication that many nations are wary about depending on the U.S. when its own outlook is so weak.

For now, demand for the dollar as a reserve currency is hardly waning. This year's record-breaking bull run in U.S. Treasurys is evidence of that.

But China is shifting some of its $2.4 trillion in reserves into Japanese yen and Korean won, which in part explains the recent runup in those currencies. And whereas the Federal Reserve's currency swap agreements with other central banks played a critical role in boosting global dollar liquidity during the 2008 financial crisis, these have since been complemented by bilateral and multilateral swap agreements in which the U.S. does not figure.

Most important is the Chiang Mai Initiative, launched in March by the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Japan and South Korea. That program draws upon a pool of $120 billion in foreign reserves to back a multilateral system of currency swaps that can be triggered if a member faces a currency crisis.

South Korea had wanted to use the Chiang Mai Initiative as a template for a global currency swap agreement. But on Tuesday, Seoul's Presidential Committee for the G-20 Summit said "the majority views (among the G-20) are that such an idea could infringe upon the sovereignty of central banks."
Presumably, the Fed and the European Central Bank are uncomfortable committing to accept certain currencies of potentially dubious value. Ironically, however, the interest in multilateral solutions is greatly dictated by other countries' concerns about the dollar.

In this sense, an expanded IMF stabilization fund--one that's not just geared toward developing nations but toward protecting the whole world from financial turmoil--offers a compromise.

Were it to take off, the IMF could evolve into a true international lender of last resort. And giving a multilateral body like the IMF more power at the expense of the U.S. would surely be preferable to having another, potentially less benign superpower simply takeover the reins.

The dollar is still king. But times are changing. It's in everybody's interest to design an international framework before the next big crisis erupts.(Wall Street Journal)










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