Connections
As the landscape of professional networks continues to evolve, members of the Columbia Business School community will rely on the power of personal contacts to transform and drive business. Our students and alumni need the power to interface with one another and build the kinds of relationships that will help them transform the business world. They want a community that separates them from the flock and brings them together in a way that is exclusive to the CBS experience. They want to connect.Connections brings together our community to change the way we communicate and share information and interests. This professional network enables our community to constantly tap into this pool of knowledge, experience, and opportunity that our students and alumni make up. Access your peers of today who will be the business leaders of tomorrow, or enjoy the benefits of the bridge to 37,000 alumni.
Connections is available to all alumni and class of 2010 graduates through the alumni website.
New to social networking? Here’s a tour of some of the site’s features.
Update Your “Profile Status”
Perhaps you’re planning to travel to Madrid in July and would like to let your overseas friends know that you’ll be there. Updating your Profile Status to “I will be in Madrid from July 13 to 23” will let your contacts know.Or maybe you want to learn more about media management. Change your Profile Status to “I am interested in opportunities in media management” so that your contacts can send you any information they may have. The possibilities are endless.
Add and Search “Tags”
On the social networking site, interests and skills function as searchable tags, or keywords. Clicking on a tag will generate a search, and all people who have listed that specific interest or skill will be included in the results.For example, if you click on the tag “Project Management,” you can see a list of everyone who has included “Project Management” as a skill, and you can browse the names of companies at which these alumni work.
If you have an interest or skill that is not listed on one of the profile forms, you can add a “free-form” tag, which will also be searchable. If you are an avid Yankees fan, for example, you could add “Yankees” as a free-form tag to your profile.
Perform Meaningful Searches
Expanded search capabilities and improved categorization of search results have been integrated into the social networking site. Use the “Keyword Search” field to search for anything from first or last name and location to education institution. The search results are then displayed in groups indicating the category in which the term was found. For example, a keyword search for “London” produces results grouped by name, address, education, and employment. So, if you were looking specifically for people working in London, you could navigate directly to the employment group.Personalize Your Profile with Multimedia
You can add photo albums, videos, and links to your profile. For example, many alumni have chosen to include a link to their LinkedIn profile; others have added personal videos and photo albums via Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube.Control Who Has Access to You and Your Information
You can restrict access to different areas of your information on the site to varying degrees. For example, if you want to post photo albums accessible only to your friends, you can restrict photo albums to “visible to only your connections.” Or perhaps you don’t want to receive connection proposals from anyone outside your program and year; you can then restrict connection proposals to only those individuals.You can also choose to keep everything visible, knowing that the network is password-protected and accessible only to members of the Columbia Business School community.
