When I originally wrote my BNI story I was an assistant director for BNI

I am no longer an Assistant Director…

…now I’m a Special Assistant Director (S.A.D.)

So, what’s changed?
As you know, the development of social networking has had a huge impact worldwide – indeed a recent statistic is that almost fifty percent of Americans are on Facebook, and there are similar impacts in other countries.

Perhaps you may have thought that BNI was just a face to face meeting organisation, but there are now opportunities to increase the business our members receive by integrating social networking too.

Many chapter members keep in touch outside of the weekly meetings using social networking and because of its nature questions can be answered quickly and simply without taking up too much time. Indeed, all you really need is a Smartphone and some time between meetings.

There are some points to consider when using social networking that make the whole process easy, particularly for those who haven’t used social networking sites before. That is one of the reasons I wrote my ‘Chocks Away’ book about this, which has been endorsed by the founder of BNI, Dr Ivan Misner.

In 2008 my business started to take off when I both joined Business Network International (BNI) and entered into the world of online networking. Effective networking has made such a massive difference to my company that I wanted to share my experiences with others.

I achieved more in six months through the combination of social networking and BNI than in the whole first two years of self employment struggling to find things out myself.

As my company specialises in helping self employed sole traders, online and offline networking is also something that many of our clients use and I can share their experiences.

My role as a Special Assistant Director for BNI Southeast will be to deliver Social Networking training and support to BNI members, to use it to grow both their own businesses and their chapters, and it is something I am really looking forward to.

As I mentioned recently, another exciting development happening in the very near future is BNI Connect – which will include a private social network just for the 135,000 current BNI members to connect with each other worldwide.

This will be a great benefit to membership, and it is only available to current members of BNI.