Subscribe to Pimp Your WorkNetworking with Jason Alba: Part V
Scot Herrick | January 26th 2007 - 04:00
Posted in Cube life, Survival Skills, Workplace Wellness, Staying Sane, Strategy
We’re interviewing Jason Alba, of JibberJobber.com, an Internet software Career Toolset that helps people manage their relationships. It has been a good week with the questions, answers and comments from readers.
Networking is a critical component of today’s work, no matter your position, location, or type of work that you do. I’m really pleased that Jason is lending his expertise to the readers here on Pimp Your Work.
Here are the questions from the last four days:
What are the 3-5 incorrect perceptions about networking?
Why should networking be something that I do all the time in my career?
What are the critical factors in understanding and managing your personal network?
Today’s last question is based upon the others and more narrowly focused on the web site JibberJobber.com. We’ve all seen an increase in electronic tools to help support networking. More famous, in my opinion, is LinkedIn. When I first heard about JibberJobber.com, my first reaction was that it was similar to LinkedIn.
Then, when Jason did an upgrade to the JibberJobber.com site, one of the upgrades was an interface into LinkedIn (and Skype!). My curiosity was up: I never thought LinkedIn did much for job seekers. What’s JibberJobber.com all about?
Thus, today’s final question for Jason:
You own JibberJobber.com, a networking management system, and recently interfaced your system into LinkedIn. How does your system work in comparison to LinkedIn?
LinkedIn allows you to connect to people, see their profile, and usually see their contacts. This is a great way to meet new people because you can reach out to your contact’s connections and grow your network.
But LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to rank your relationship with each contact, log important dates, thoughts and meetings about each contact, create action items so you know when you should contact them next, etc. In fact, within LinkedIn you can’t control anything that those contacts do, or track any of it.
That’s where JibberJobber comes in – it complements LinkedIn to allow you to really manage each relationship.
Other differentiating factors include privacy (whatever you put into JibberJobber is private and not seen by others) and exclusivity (if my network is confined to LinkedIn, and you aren’t a LinkedIn user, then you can’t be in my network! But I can still add your record to JibberJobber – it doesn’t matter whether you are a JibberJobber user or not.).
JibberJobber sits as a hub to manage data and information you get from LinkedIn as well as many other sources.
A Pimpalicious addition:
This was my issue with LinkedIn — it doesn’t do a good job of managing the relationship. JibberJobber was the first tool that I’ve seen (and I am sure there are others) that extends the idea of a simple contact database to one where there is the ability to work with the information about the people with whom you have relationships. Jason’s description of JibberJobber as a “hub” to manage information was the “light bulb turning on” for me on the criticality of the tool needed for networking.
I personally want to take this opportunity to thank Jason for working with us here at Pimp Your Work. It was my first interview and I can tell you that, even though Jason made it as easy as possible after my request, it is a lot more work to put together than I originally thought!
Check out JibberJobber.com and Jason’s JibberJobber blog and get a Career Toolset. You’ll be glad you did.
cube life Staying Sane Strategy Survival Skills workplace wellness
About 'Networking with Jason Alba: Part V'
This entry was posted on January 26th 2007 by Scot Herrick.
It was posted in Cube life, Survival Skills, Workplace Wellness, Staying Sane, Strategy
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Scot, I sincerely appreciate this opportunity - a year ago I didn’t like networking, I didn’t want to network, and I had my own opinion about anyone that said they liked it
But out of necessity I had to start somewhere, and as I’ve learned more about what it really is, I’ve grown to love it… its just about building relationships. All the benefits come with that, but for me, its just about the relationships. Excellent commentary, and thanks for inviting me to participate 
You’re welcome. Learning comes from being under fire, doesn’t it?
I really appreciate that you didn’t just learn about building relationships, but you took what you learned and built a tool that others can use to support and manage their relationships as well.
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