I had a little focused time to really look at xing.com the other day… and using the xing plugin (have I mentioned how much I dislike plugins?) I pulled emails from my Outlook and sent off invitations to people to join my network on Xing.  This took about 2 hours for the plugin to digest my Outlook and spit out potential folks to invite.

For those of you who do not know Xing.com, it is a publicly traded company in Germany, that is the Euro counterpart to Linkedin.com (altho both may have issues with that comparison). 

I sent out 400+ invitations.  And many people signed up within seconds of receiving their invite (I know, because Xing sends me a confirmation of the person who signed up at my invitation).  So far, only one person has emailed me personally asking who I am and how they know me. 

I am not saying that I sent 400+ invites to total strangers…these are people I have done business with, or made inquiries to for business, and so they qualify as passing acquaintances and are certainly appropriate to invite to a social/business networking tool. 

I am saying that the phenomenon of receiving an invitation to join these sorts of networks must be so commonplace, that people sign up without thinking too much about it.  Either they were already familiar with Xing.com or I had left a favorable impression in our last email interchange or they are simply open to exploring new apps as they are presented to them.

In any event, I am glad that I make notes on my vcards about how I met someone and so I was able to quickly answer with specific information – the gentleman who queried “Who are you and How do I know you?” and we had a nice email conversation, allowing us to get reacquainted, since it had been June of last year when I last spoke with him.  I don’t know if he will choose to join Xing.com, but I do know that the invitation opened the door a little bit wider for our discussions, and I have a better idea how to I could be of help to him in the future in our business dealings.

And that understanding may help me grow the business I am in… which is what I am networking to do.