For most of us we go through our lives building and sustaining both personal and professional relationships. As people we make every effort to make the right connections and we quickly find that connections lead to connections and soon (hopefully) we find that we have built a network that is important for our business or professional career, or at least for a healthy social life.
With so much emphasis now on “knowledge”, there just doesn’t seem enough time in the day: perhaps we should all stay at home with computers and hang the social life (hardly). The internet is the largest and fastest growing reservoir of knowledge yet known to man, and yes many of us spend rather a lot of time surfing. It may surprise you though that the concept of “who you know” and “mutual back scratching” is fundamental to the way the web works. If web sites were people, they would be networking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or else they should be.
Where web sites and the Internet are concerned, relationships are expressed by links and picked up by search engines. Search engines travel the World Wide Web following links, and ranking web pages. Search engines look at links as votes. The more links your website has, the more votes it gains to be categorized as an authority on your subject (or product or service). Not all links are created equal. Links from more popular websites are more valuable then links from less popular sites. Search engines are smart enough to know that content is related, so, links from relevant sites are more important then links from irrelevant ones.
Bringing this back to “real people” though, and what we find interesting makes us click and keeps us surfing. Links by themselves are boring: they need headlines, they need to be relevant, and better still, they need to take us to information, products, services, articles and so forth that we are actually looking for (or did not realize we were looking for). Relevant links make surfing rewarding. Links are the “who you know”, and content is the “what you learn”.
For web site owners though, building links can be a chore: in fact it is a chore. It is extremely time consuming, often frustrating, and can be expensive. Global District though stops it being a chore and actually makes it satisfying ... fun ... and potentially financially rewarding.
Global District Networks are created in line with the principles outlined above. You can select the businesses you wish to partner and link to in the same way you might shop online: you tick the box and add them to your network. You are in a way shopping for content and partners only these are people you know and work with on a daily basis. The Global District system then generates the networks that you wish to develop, not only for links, but also for press releases, events, products for sale, or just contact details. This then updates your web site automatically creating the content that attracts visitors and facilitates the reciprocation that nurtures relationships, and improves the performance of your web site at the same time.
This is not an automated system though. This is about real people forging real partnerships. The selections are made by people and absolutely not by computer. Automated systems should be avoided because they can’t reflect real relationships and are open to abuse. Our goal is to provide relevant content and help sustain partnerships that work.
HolywoodGoesGlobal is a virtual community and "website to website" virtual networking platform, allowing members to promote, reciprocate (cross promote), and build web pages, virtual networks, shared calendars, shared maps ... to support local (or global), or corporate initiatives. Login or Sign Up here: a full suite of web tools to manage content, networks and feeds (RSS live links) is provided.
Holywood GoesGlobal
is a platform for promoting Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland.
Members can promote their news, events, galleries, products or services, or use the networking engine to help drive initiatives and parterships. Click on a symbol to learn more, or simply Sign Up or Login here to use the tools.
Up and coming events posted in Holywood - from 03 September 2010:
