After using the business networking organization Linkedin.com for two weeks, I was invited by a contact on Linkedin to establish a profile and join OpenBC, another networking organization. I spent several hours opening my OpenBC account and creating a profile, much like the one on LinkedIn. For those of you are unfamiliar with Open Business Club (OpenBC), it is a Europe-based professional networking site similar to LinkedIn. I was eager to develop more contacts in Europe, so I went into the registration with optimism and enthusiasm.
For the first month, new members are given a premium membership to try out different features of OpenBC. I could not see much benefit from the premium membership that I would not have with the free membership. People from throughout the OpenBC network appear on searches, not just members of the user's much smaller network of friends. However, searches are limited to 200 profiles, so if you are looking for someone who works for General Electric in Europe -- and there are thousands -- you have a slim chance of finding that person without more detailed information like his or her name or the city where he or she lives.
The major drawback of OpenBC is that while a user can upload a large group of email addresses and invite those email addresses to link with him, there is no facility for otherwise sending invitations to more than one user at a time. The creators of OpenBC explain this as a requirement to prevent spamming. However, for someone who wants to develop ties to Poland and invite Polish users to join his network, it is exceedingly tedious to invite people one-by-one with a message for each recipient.
Similarly, if you wanted to invite people who work for Volkswagon, you would have to invite them one by one into your network. After several hours, I gave up with the tedium.
A second drawback of OpenBC is that it has not yet achieved widespread appeal. I looked for people working at the Swiss mutual fund called Unifund SA. OpenBC had no contacts at Unifund; Linkedin had six or seven. Similarly, I looked for employees of Moore Capital Management in London, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. OpenBC had no contacts at Moore; Linkedin had over a dozen people working for Moore and 4 of them were in London.
So for now, I plan to stop working on my OpenBC profile and just check it once a week to approve anyone who wants to link with me. There are definitely more users from Europe on OpenBC than on LinkedIn, but I have not found any way to gain from those additional users.
There may be an even better alternative to either LinkedIn or OpenBC for developing professional networking contacts. It is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service called Skype. I recommend all my professional business contacts download Skype, which is free to join and free to download, at www.skype.com
Last week, a recruiter posted a job opening about an equity option market making position with a London-based hedge fund. After doing some research on the Internet, I discovered the firm is most likely Moore Capital Management.
I am presently using Linkedin to reach out to a Director at Moore Capital Management located in New York city. If the introduction goes through, then I will ask him if he knows who is in charge of the equity option trading desks in London.
However, if this person in New York belonged to Skype, then I could just "call" him for free over my computer and carry on a voice conversation. Sometimes people prefer to answer an inquiry quickly over the phone, rather than to have to type out an email message and send it.
Even if he does not subscribe to Skype, the service offers a method of calling phone numbers using your computer speaker and microphone for about 2.5 cents within the United States, and for less than 3 cents to most of the countries of Western Europe and Latin America. The charge to call Romania was about 12 cents/minute, which is not cheap, but certainly cheaper than AT&T's rate.
The long distance dialing to a "land line" is called Skype Out. It is activated when a user purchases a 10 British pound quantity of long distance minutes, which do not seem to expire as long as the user does not leave them idle for 180 days.
A 10 pound investment is about $18.08 American dollars at today's conversion rate. It strikes me that $18.08 is a very reasonable investment to make for the ability to reach out and call people world-wide for low Skype rates. I know there are job hunters in this forum. Instead of wasting time and energy writing various contacts and trying to find the hiring manager for the position you want, imagine the ease of picking up your computer microphone, dialing a number on your computer, and talking directly with that person (after being bounced around a few times to get that person's name).
Skype seems to be the most efficient way to establish a professional business network, schedule conference calls between Skype members at no cost, and find new power dealmaking opportunities.
Michael A. S. Guth is a trilingual (English, German, French) qualified transactional lawyer and financial manager with fifteen years experience and legal expertise in the areas of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures; securities regulation and hedge fund creation; and deal structuring / business transactions. To further compliment his legal skill set Michael is an experienced investment banker having worked within the top tier investment banks, namely Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Bank, working with an international clientele. He played an instrumental role in developing an index-tracking fund and answered technical questions on fund management marketing calls. He advised clients on pre-IPO investments, stock repurchases, and using structured finance products to manage risk. Previously directed the risk management and financial control groups for two trading floors. Contact him through his web page at http://riskmgmt.biz