As with many things in life, many opportunities revolve around who you know as opposed to what you know. Yes sure you have to know the fundamentals of whatever it is that you are involved in, however many a partnership have sprouted from association and networking between “subject matter experts”.

While networking can be and has been abused in the past, making a concerted effort to meet new business contacts is vital for your business’s longevity and credibility and constitutes as being one of the fundamental parts making up your organisations skeleton, so much so that without it many organisations would be just like jelly, nice… but wobbly, unstable and soluble.

Knowing who you are in your industry, how you relate to your competitors, how your peers view you as well as how you fit into the grand scheme of things is vital information and key information to those looking to make calculated and wise business decisions.

A few weeks ago bidorbuy hosted our very first networking conference with the intention of unifying subject matter experts and industry peers, by bringing them together to brainstorm, find solutions to industry specific problems, inspire, motivate and get to know some of the top players in the South African online business scene. The conference was hosted at The Westin Grand Cape Town Arrabella Quays which saw the likes of Jump Shopping, The Classifieds, Jobs.co.za, Private Property, Safari Now, Dating Buzz, MyAdsl as well as Mail & Guardian attend.

The topics discussed included competition in the local market, SEO and online marketing from a web 2.0 standpoint, social networking and SMO as well as telecommunications, bandwidth and other aspects pertaining to internet access.

Attending these kinds of “get-togethers” and operatively paying attention during them, is one of the greatest ways of fast tracking your learning process as well as finding out news going on in your industry you may not have been savvy to.

The worth attained from working though these kinds of questions as well as any disputes that arise is so valuable and is delivered in such a constructive way that it’s no wonder the bosses are always off to lunch meetings and other glamorous sounding events.

The bottom line is to remember, and this goes for any employee; where ever you go and whom ever you talk to, essentially you are a representative of your company and the way in which you talk about your company is crucial when networking as you and only you have the power to make or break any business relationship