Has networking changed in the last 4 years ?

This week my new book 'Friends with Benefits' was launched onto the virtual shelves of the Ecademy Press webshop and Amazon.co.uk.

Next month, 21/11/2009, the official Booklaunch-event will take place in my hometown Diest (B).

Because this new book is launched exactly 4 years after my first book, 'A Girlfriend in Every City', it also shows the change (or not ?) that happened in social networking during this period.

This gave me the idea to pour the complete text of both books into Word-clouds, to spot some major differences and similarities.

A Girlfriend in Every City (2005)

Friends with Benefits (2009)

It seems that after 4 years the focus has shifted a little bit from business networking to social networking which got much broader and 'part of the furniture'.

In general not much has changed. Networking still isn't about business, but about people. Networking is still about building a reputation and gaining trust.

Following people on networks like Twitter is still pretty new but became a natural habbit in a very short time.

I'm absolutely shure that if I had written this book 6 months later, one of the buzz-words would have been 'Real-time' because that's the technology all online social media are now implementing.

It's interesting to see that networking actually didn't change that much over the last 4 years, it did however get accepted by a much broader audience. More and more people feel the need to start networking because today's world is demanding it !