Mashable.com has a post, written by Soren Gordhamer, that is titled “7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media.” Gordhamer says “Many of us are on both sides of this relationship— sometimes making the connection, sometimes receiving the invitation.” His article is a good tool to use with actionable tips on improving your networking skills.

Tell us about your network and some of the things that you have learned to best utilize your network for 2010.

Best Nicole

Social media allows us to discover, connect, and engage with new people of interest. While most people are open to new connections and receiving messages from people they don’t know, there is a fine line between reaching out and “spamming.” The challenge is to make a connection clearly and effectively without wasting people’s time.

Many of us are on both sides of this relationship — sometimes making the connection, sometimes receiving the invitation. To help navigate these waters a little better, I’ve outlined seven key lessons for improving your social networking skills.

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1. Find a Person’s Preferred Communication Channel

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If you want to contact someone you have never communicated with before, do some research. Find the person’s preferred communication channel. If they have a website, check out their contact page and see if they encourage people to contact them in a particular way, and follow their suggestion.

It also helps to discover what level of participation they have on various social networks (Twitter (), Facebook (), YouTube ()) to see which places may be best to engage them. When is the last time they posted on Twitter or Facebook? Do they respond to the @replies they receive on Twitter or comments on a Facebook page? Get a sense of their preferred means of communication, and make contact where they are.

Lesson: Go where they are.

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2. Say Just Enough

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This cannot be emphasized enough, and it is probably my toughest challenge. In the age of social media, we may be able to get the attention of more people, but we get it for a much shorter amount of time. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is that they send long e-mails or social media messages explaining all the reasons they want to connect. You are likely have not earned not earned the five minutes of the recipient’s time that it will take to read that message.

Brevity is built right into Twitter, making it a great platform for making a first connection. However, if you use other channels, keep it simple. If there are 700 words you eventually want to get across, include only 50 in the first contact. Let the person choose if he or she would like more. You can fill in the rest later. I prefer a less complete 50 words than 700 words that tell me more than I need to know.

Lesson: Less is more.

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3. Don’t Expect a Response

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I often see e-mails with phrases like “Please respond,” or “please get back to me.” Unless it is an old friend or a colleague, if you are contacting someone new, you are not entitled to a response. If the person wants to get back to you, he or she will. It is much better to say “If this is not of interest, feel no need to get back to me.”

At times I hear people complain because they reached out to someone and never heard back. The fact is most people do not have the time to get back to everyone who contacts them to say, “not interested.” Open a door without adding pressure. There may be times to follow-up, of course, but don’t do so with resentment or frustration.

Lesson: Say what you need to and then let it go.

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4. Clarify Early

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This may seem like common sense, but don’t wait for the last line of your message to say that you want to meet for lunch, or ask your contact if he’d like to speak at an event. Put it right up front. If he cannot provide what you’re looking for, he’ll know sooner rather than later, and will appreciate you for it.

Lesson: Say it up front.

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5. What You Want is Not the Point

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You may think that what you want is a phone call or lunch meeting to discuss your big idea. But communication is more than any one project or meeting. What you really want is an authentic connection.

In a very real way, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the person is interested in discussing your project idea. What matters is whether you are making a connection.

If you focus on the relationship more than the specific request, and the person has a pleasant experience reading your opening communication, it is likely the door will remain open for possible collaboration in the future, and the next e-mail you send will more likely be fruitful.

Lesson: No one knows what the future may hold, so make the moment count. Ensure the door stays open, even if no one is walking through it right now.

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6. Be Open Without Needing

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Needy never goes over well. Statements like “I really need to talk to you,” or “it is essential that we speak,” show your general insecurity. There is a huge difference between being open to collaboration and “needing” it.

Do not make contact until you find that place in yourself that is totally comfortable with any outcome, including a strong “no” or no response at all. Only then can you make authentic contact. When you do, openness rather than need will come through in your words.

Lesson: Speak from openness rather than need.

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7. Give Space

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The key questions people have when someone new reaches out to them, particularly those who are quite busy, are “Do I have time to bring this person into my network? How much time will they take?”

Therefore, it is generally not helpful to send too many e-mails. Doing this may send the signal that you are going to take a lot of the recipient’s time and send numerous e-mails every day, and communicating with you will take great effort.

Instead, give communication some space. Unless something is very timely, let a bit of time pass before sending a response. Let communication have some breathing room. Once there is some level of trust, you can experiment with more immediate information exchange.

Lesson: Focus on thoughtful instead of continual contact.

Quateman LLP is California’s largest women-owned municiple bond counsel firm and is turning 20. The attached article about their accomplishments comes from “The Bond Buyer”.  The paragraph that hooked me comes from Lisa Greer Quateman:

“Quateman said she would like to continue to grow the firm and is considering adding another lawyer this year. But growth doesn’t just mean climbing the league tables. It means getting tougher assignments and being taken seriously enough that new clients don’t always think of Quateman as the women-owned firm that’s nice to have as a co-counsel.”

“In a lot of ways, we’ve transcended only being a women-owned business and getting the smaller pieces of deals,” she said. “In our own right now, we are bond counsel, disclosure counsel, underwriters’ counsel on pretty significant deals.”

Quateman said her firm has done extraordinarily complex work over the years, both inside and outside of its muni practice.”

Being respected by sharing the quality and caliber of work that you do will always be the way to present your product, service and value to world at large.

Enjoy the full article below.

Best Nicole

SAN FRANCISCO – Quateman LLP, California’s biggest women-owned municipal bond counsel firm, is turning 20 this year and still growing its slice of the marketplace – long after most governments in the state stopped giving any preference to women-owned businesses.

“Governments and companies want a vendor base that matches their constituency,” said Lisa Greer Quateman, the firm’s founder. “Most importantly in the public finance arena, they value the additional sets of eyes and they realize that it is in their interest to promote new firms and new faces in the business, so that they will have a large enough pool of competing firms from which to choose.”

Quateman, who spent the first part of her career as a securities and real estate lawyer at big national and international companies, started her own firm in 1989 without much thought of being a women-owned business. But as she tried to build the business, she found that governments with diversity programs were more open to hiring an upstart women-owned firm than private-sector securities clients.

Kathleen Brown, now a managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in Los Angeles, helped give Quateman a start in the muni business when she pushed to include women- and minority-owned businesses among the state’s financing teams during her tenure as California treasurer from 1991 to 1995.

Quateman started in the muni bond business as a co-underwriters’ counsel on deals led by Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, which dominates the public finance business in California. Acceptance into the state bond counsel pool and time spent toiling as a co-counsel opened the door to many more clients for her Los Angeles-based firm.

From 1989 to 2008, Quateman served as bond counsel on $11.6 billion of bonds, according to Thomson Reuters data, with the bulk of that taking place in the past five years. Since 2004, the firm has been bond counsel on $10 billion of bonds, about 85% of its total in the past two decades, according to Thomson. That made it the top ranked women-owned firm in California over the past five years and the seventh ranked firm overall in the state. Quateman also served as underwriters’ counsel on $3.2 billion of bonds.

The firm remains a part of the state’s pool of bond counsel. It has also worked deals as bond counsel, underwriters’ counsel, or disclosure counsel for many major municipal issuers across the state, including Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.

The firm’s biggest single issue as bond counsel was a $768 million tax and revenue anticipation note for Los Angeles in 2006. Its toughest assignment was a much smaller 2006 deal for Gardena. Quateman was bond counsel and disclosure counsel for the city when it sold $25 million of certificates of participation that got it back into the market after a brush with insolvency.

The firm continued to grow even after California voters amended the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in contracting or employment when they passed Ward Connerly’s Proposition 209 in 1996. A series of U.S. Supreme Court cases in the late 1990s also severely restricted the ability of governments to promote women- and minority-owned businesses by requiring “strict scrutiny” of government affirmative action policies.

“Initially, she was hired because we were attempting to meet some [diversity] goals,” said James Preusch, chief financial officer of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority in Los Angeles County and former chief financial officer for the Port of Los Angeles, where he first hired Quateman. “But the fact of the matter is that this firm has the ability to carry its weight regardless of that status and far more so now than ever before.”

Quateman has grown from a one-woman shop to a firm that includes a dozen lawyers with major focuses in municipal finance, complex real estate workouts, and corporate finance as its business has grown.

While Lisa Quateman continues to work actively in all the firm’s practice areas, she has added lawyers to specialize in public finance, including Timothy Reimers, whom Quateman calls her “right-hand man” in the public finance practice. The firm employs many men, but remains majority women-owned and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future, given its current cast of partners.

“I’d characterize the firm as top-notch,” Preusch said, adding that it delivers “quality work on time, without the Madison Avenue pricing.”

Quateman said she would like to continue to grow the firm and is considering adding another lawyer this year. But growth doesn’t just mean climbing the league tables. It means getting tougher assignments and being taken seriously enough that new clients don’t always think of Quateman as the women-owned firm that’s nice to have as a co-counsel.

“In a lot of ways, we’ve transcended only being a women-owned business and getting the smaller pieces of deals,” she said. “In our own right now, we are bond counsel, disclosure counsel, underwriters’ counsel on pretty significant deals.”

Quateman said her firm has done extraordinarily complex work over the years, both inside and outside of its muni practice.

One of her first big breaks was when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Resolution Trust Corp. sought to include women in its vendor pool back in the early 1990s during the savings and loan crisis. But she said the quality of the firm’s work helping the FDIC and RTC negotiating hundreds of complicated restructurings and workouts during the nation’s last big real-estate bust helped convince the FDIC to hire the firm again last year, when the credit crunch and housing market implosion brought down IndyMac Bank and Washington Mutual.

While she doesn’t want her firm to get pigeon-holed as just a women-owned law firm, Quateman doesn’t dismiss the importance of the diversity programs that gave her firm a chance to prove itself.

“Gender, per se, should not necessarily be an issue, but if we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that the top ranks in both law and business still do not reflect the percentage of women who are eligible and qualified,” she said. She praised political leaders like New York Gov. David Paterson for finding legal ways to continue to expand the diversity of government supplier networks.

“Leveling the playing field still matters,” Quateman said. “Case in point: About 42% of my graduating class from UCLA School of Law was female, yet today the percentage of female law firm partners and managers is well under half of that.”

“Most marketers are using a social media page with one or more on-page applications, but this is the first campaign we’ve worked on that also offers deeper user applications that drive interaction and the viral element by getting site users to then get their friends involved,” says Scott Kleper, chief technology officer and founder of San Francisco-based Context Optional, which developed the campaign’s applications.

So here is what the campaign consisted of:

The campaign, launched Nov. 26 and running through Jan. 4, centers on a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/claus) hosted by “Claüs”–the hipper name chosen by Santa Claus to reflect his “down” new image and lifestyle since he was transformed by being gifted with a Palm Centro. (Sample profile copy: “I functioned for centuries as a recluse, only emerging once a year under the cover of darkness to spread joy … The phone inspired me to turn my life around, I got in shape, found a new tailor, it’s like I feel 30 years younger … don’t try to sit on my lap, a fist bump will do.”)

The page includes five main applications: Claüs’s Yule Log Music Player (downloadable); the ClaüsRemixed holiday album (also downloadable); a Claüs video player (downloadable with ability to share viral videos); Naughty or Nice (users submit friends’ names for Claüs’ two lists); and the Claüs White Elephant Party (where users can play the classic trade-off-bad-gifts party game on Facebook with … guess who).

There are also ample videos (such as Claüs’ encounter at a posh restaurant with a confused valet charged with parking the Bearded One’s sleigh), and new ones are being added frequently to keep the site fresh, reports Palm Director of Marketing Communications Scott Hancock. Then there’s the wish list contest-one good little Facebook user who’s texted Claüs the gift he/she most wants (up to $10,000 in price) will see that wish come true. And of course, the page features Claüs replying to posts and offers holiday e-cards featuring the Claüster using his Centro while perched on a chimney, rather recklessly driving his sleigh, etc.

Traffic-driving components included launching the site by airing a longer (60-second) video on cable (including Bravo, MTV, VH1, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, E! Entertainment, Comedy Central, G4, Fuse and TBS) and in movie theaters in key metro markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. Other support includes bus shelter ads and billboards.

They say the most interesting aspect is that 26% of the Claus visitors have come from friends sending to friends. This example continues to show the promise of viral marketing and a very clever way to engage your customer.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday. I hope you will continue to pass on our blog in 2009!

Best Nicole

PS check out the BCAD Group fan page on Facebook!