This article starts by looking at the benefits of networking for creative people. I then survey 10 social networks that should be on your radar as a creative professional. I’ve included generous quotations from network founders and users, explaining the networks’ individual cultures, how to use them, and how they can help your creativity and your career.

Photo by luc legay

You MUST Network If You Want to Succeed in a Creative Profession

Like the people in the famous scene from the Life of Brian, we creative types love to think of ourselves as individuals, but in reality we’re part of a crowd. Or as Mark Earls or Seth Godin would have it, a Herd or a Tribe. Feel free to ignore that fact if you’re happy to starve in a garret, undiscovered by a Philistine world - but if you’re serious about getting your work in front of an audience and reaping the rewards your work deserves, then here’s why networking is essential to your success.

Richard Florida groups all creative professionals together in what he calls the Creative Class. Whether or not you go that far, it’s undeniable that many creatives take part of their identity from membership of one or more creative subcultures. This often works at an instinctive level - I recently attended my first event organised by 26, and was pleasantly surprised to find I instantly felt at home. It took a few moments for the reason to sink in - just about everyone in the room was, like me, a professional wordsmith. It was like meeting up with old friends, and I felt I belonged. The following week I made my first visit to London’s Design Museum, which I found enjoyable and interesting, but with a vague sense of being an outsider.

Identity is not the only thing we get from being part of a creative group or network. It’s a truism that creative inspiration often happens when disparate ideas, influences and materials are put together in novel combinations. Frans Johansson has written an excellent book, The Medici Effect, based on this idea:

when you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas.

The book’s title comes from the Medici family of bankers in 15th century Florence, who used their money and influence to gather a wide range of creative professionals to their city:

Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas - what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicentre of the creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history.
Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect

If you’re reading this you’ve probably noticed that at the beginning of the 21st century we are at the epicentre of a similar creative explosion. This time (fortunately) we’re not relying on the bankers, and we don’t need to physically assemble in Florence. The internet is a virtual Florence, enabling us to step into an intersection of fields, disciplines and cultures the like of which the world has never seen. Social media technologies are providing us with opportunities to exchange ideas, stimulate and teach each other that are at least as exciting as those available to the great minds of the Renaissance.

As well as creative stimulation, a network of contacts is a great source of professional opportunities. When you need a highly skilled person for an important project, your first port of call is likely to be your network of trusted contacts. If you don’t know someone yourself, a recommendation from someone whose judgement you trust can be priceless. And the more visible you are in the right networks, the more likely you are to be the one recommended when opportunities come along.

I’ve said before that one of the best things about being a creative is getting to work with other cool creative dudes. Your professional network is a happy hunting ground for potential collaborators and partners. As with opportunities, the more talented and trusted people you know, the better your chances of assembling the perfect team.

Last but not least, hanging around with other creative people is fun! For many people, ‘networking’ is a dirty word, but we’re lucky in the creative sector in that most people on the scene tend to be interesting to talk to, either because of what they do, who they are, or both.

So where are the hottest hangouts in Virtual Florence? Where can you go to feel at home and find inspiration, opportunities, collaborators and a damn good laugh? I’ve assembled a list of 10 social networks that you should be aware of. They won’t all be up your street - some of them will be like that new bar where you stay for one drink and make a swift exit. But you should at least know what’s on offer in each of these places, so that you can make an informed decision about where best to spend your time.

MAINSTREAM SOCIAL NETWORKS OF INTEREST TO CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS

Facebook

Early last year I was receiving so many invitations to Facebook that I got the distinct impression I was missing out if I didn’t sign up. After an initial flurry of enthusiasm for the site, I’m left with the feeling that the number of people on Facebook is still its main attraction. I don’t go there much these days, but when I need to get in touch with someone it’s usually just as quick to look them up on Facebook as it is to sift through my business cards and address books. Like a lot of people, I’ve been put off by waves of spammy applications and zombie sheep. At first it was fun and convenient to have friends and business contacts mixed up on the same network, now it just feels a bit messy.

And yet … Facebook is still a great way to reach or stay in touch with lots of people. I find it particularly good for staying in touch with friends, but it has some USPs for business as well. For example, you can quickly and easily set up a page or group about your website, company or other interest, and it’s pretty easy for people to join - most of them will have registered with Facebook already, so it’s just an extra click to join your group. I set up a Wishful Thinking group based around my other blog, which gives me another way of interacting with my readers. And it made it easy to research this part of the post: I just logged in to Facebook and sent a message to everyone in the group, asking how useful they think Facebook is for creative professionals. Here are some of the responses.

How useful? Very, if you use it strategically. Most of my contacts are on Facebook. As my profession involves a certain social element as well as a public presence, it’s good that facebook provides my friends/clients/fans with updates on what I’m doing and where I am.

I have personally made quite a lot of new business through Facebook by providing a consistent message on what I’m about. I don’t add any apps really - and most of my updates relate to my work. A drip drip drip effect into the collective social consciousness has meant that on many occasions, people have approached me via FB for jobs. But that wouldn’t have happened if I’d just used it as a scrapbook of my random life experiences.
Tom Hayton

Working from home has its drawbacks… I go days without ever leaving the house, making it hard to meet the neighbors or make new friends. I tend to be a little introverted anyway - which never helps in networking.

What Facebook, and other social media such as Twitter has done for me personally is put a face to a name, taking away the anxiety of meeting someone for the first time. No longer am I sending resumes out to people who I have never met and have no idea what their background is or what they look like or like to do for a hobby. I consciously target and choose those that I follow rather than rack up hundreds of people just for the sake of having a lot of friends. I have many FB and twitter followers down in Minneapolis who I have never met face to face (yet), but I know where they work and what they are working on. I know what interests we share in common. I have asked for their opinion of my online portfolio and gotten some really good feedback.
Scott Schmidt

For me, Facebook is about keeping in touch with old friends, and learning a little more about new ones. Where the creative field is concerned, I find blogs a much more effective method of networking.
David Airey

Facebook has been a life saver for my business! As a creative professional I realised that 95% of my business comes from referrals. So I started using facebook to keep my network informed about what I was doing and recent successes and awards. I call it “soft marketing” My network would see the new clients and project I completed. Everyone loves success. This “announcement” would always drive new business, It kept me in the front of their minds when opportunities came up in their life. That translated to a referrals and new opportunity for my company.
Ricardo McRae

MySpace

MySpace takes a lot of flak - for its ugly user pages, its culture of collecting thousands of ‘friends’ with no apparent connection to each other, and for being owned by Rupert Murdoch. On the other hand, it has a population about the size of Russia and as the saying goes, 100 million people can’t be wrong. Personally I find it a bit loud and garish, but I’m starting to feel the same way about nightclubs, so maybe that says more about my age than it does about MySpace.

For many creatives, joining MySpace will be a matter of taste, but the consensus is that if you’re a musician you don’t have a choice - you have to be on it. Andrew Dubber, a respected authority on web strategies for musicians, says his dislike of MySpace ‘borders on the pathological’, but his verdict is unequivocal:

I’m not a fan of MySpace. Hate it with a fiery passion, in fact. And yet, when I compiled a recent top 10 list of music-related sites that artists NEED to be on, this came out as number one. It’s not relevant because it’s good - it’s important because it’s so widespread.
New Music Strategies

Acknowledging its evil necessity, Dubber offers some useful tips on ‘how to avoid the worst MySpace crimes‘.

As I don’t have much experience of MySpace myself, I asked Steve Lawson, musician and social media strategist for creatives, for his opinion:

There are a few key elements to using Myspace for musicians. The most important is to realise what a dreadful broadcast platform it is. The second is that most musicians are trying to broadcast from it.

The set of tools that Myspace offers to musicians are done better elsewhere, but what myspace has that no other network has is numbers. Millions of users interested in music. However, so much of the traffic is musicians “shouting” at other musicians, and failing spectacularly to converse or engage with anyone. Myspace’s very success is also its greatest downfall. The sheer number of internet users who see Myspace as their one musical platform means that there’s very little conceptual thinking going on amongst the majority of users.

However, if one does “get” it, the volume of users and the way that people follow internal links within the site means that you can connect with some great people. Sadly, the prevalence of spammers and shouters on there means that very few people read the artist bulletins and blogs, but those resources are there to be used if you’re willing to educate your audience.

Bottom line, Myspace is best seen as a place to replicate content generated elsewhere, as a way of engaging those web users who feel most at home there.
Steve Lawson (Steve’s MySpace page; Steve’s website)

LinkedIn

That’s right, LinkedIn. I know it doesn’t have a particularly creative image, but don’t write it off. The first time I visited LinkedIn, I spent ages trying to work out how to upload a photo. It gradually dawned on me that there was no facility to do so - it was far too serious a place for fripperies like that. It has since loosened its tie a bit and allowed photos, but make no mistake, LinkedIn is for people who want to talk business.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook, LinkedIn is deliberately designed to limit the number of contacts you can make - to add someone as a contact, you need to know them from another context, or at least know their e-mail address. At first this might seem a bit restrictive, but the advantage is that everyone on your LinkedIn network is likely to be someone with whom you have a ‘real’ relationship with. So 50 contacts on LinkedIn could be worth more to your career than 500 friends on Facebook or 5,000 on MySpace.

So how useful is LinkedIn to creative professionals? Is it simply corporate for creative people? Those are questions I put to LinkedIn users via the site’s Question and Answer system. The consensus seemed to be that LinkedIn is indeed pretty ‘corporate’, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and could even offer advantages to people and companies from the creative industries:

As someone not in the corporate world, but someone who targets the corporate world (as well as everyone else) Linkedin has given my business more exposure than I would ever hope for. I’ve booked jobs at trade shows, corporate parties, grand openings, promotional events, etc., from having a presence on Linkedin.
Dave Maskin

It provides a platform to express artistic points of view within a business framework. If, as artists, we are commissioned to provide creative solutions to help businesses solve business problems, then have a business framework to “test” our thoughts and ideas is a critical component to our success.

LI is ‘corporate.’ Is it fair? Sure, why not? Think of it this way. If it weren’t, then it would be like so many other social sites, right? Then what would make LI unique? LI’s ‘corporate-ness’ is what makes it unique.
Thomas Clifford

In starting a new business, I have found much of the whole process to be quite creative (or at least it can be). And some of the information & advice I’ve gotten can be quite interestingly applied to music as well as business. I’m working in two totally different fields, but the carryover between the two is sometimes surprising. I actually think that the LI and creative communities would both benefit from an influx of more creatives into LI. Seeing business with more creative eyes and creative projects from a more business standpoint can be quite enlightening.
Julie Goodale

I think LinkedIn gets bad rep at least with creatives because it is not hip, cool, trendy (insert your own word) as Facebook, Twitter, etc. I would counter that Facebook, Twitter and others are geared differently. The other social networks are kind of catch alls. Some use them for business, some for personal and some for both where Linkedin is pretty heavy business/professional not a lot of personal. That is actually the reason I spend more time on LinkedIn.

If this was designed specifically for creative professionals it would be called “iTalk” or “iSocialize” and probably underwritten by Apple or Microsoft.
Ken Bullock

In all, I received 10 high-quality answers, which seems fairly typical of the Q&A section. Shapeshifters may well be the only other network on this list where I would be pretty well guaranteed to get so many thoughtful and helpful responses. Thomas Clifford pointed out that the Q&A section can be very useful tool for creative research. Apparently asking and answering questions is also good for building reputation and contacts - from my limited experience of it I can certainly see how that could work.

So LinkedIn is growing on me. It’s never going to be a fun venue for idle chitchat, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s good to know there is a site with informed professional discussion on tap. Although the Q&A section has its share of stupid questions, compared to the free-for-all of some other networks it’s an oasis of intelligent debate. As James Dempsey puts it, ‘There’s a lot less of the Britney Spears drama to sift through on LinkedIn’.

Twitter

Logging on to Twitter is like stepping into one of the illustrations from Where’s Waldo? - you find yourself in the midst of a crowd of people dashing in all directions, criss-crossing as they go about their business. Taken in isolation, each character and scene is unremarkable, but joining the crowd is pleasantly beguiling and energising. Step back and look at the whole picture and it borders on the breathtaking.

More prosaically, here’s how it works. Once you’ve signed up for a free account at twitter.com, you’re presented with a text box holding up to 140 characters and the question ‘What are you doing?’. Type your answer, press ’send’ and you’re away. Or you will be, as soon as anyone decides to follow your updates (known as ‘Tweets’). And don’t forget to follow other people - just click on the ‘follow’ link on their profile and you’ll automatically receive their updates whenever you’re logged on. Depending on where you live, you may also be able to use Twitter on your mobile phone (hence the 140 character limit, the maximum permitted via SMS). We recently had the Twitter text message service withdrawn in the UK, leading to (ahem) withdrawal symptoms for some, but I guess it contains the digital addiction.

Feel free to ignore the question about what you’re doing. Unless you’re an astronaut or serial dragon slayer, your followers will probably have finite interest in the minutiae of your everyday life. The most interesting Twitter users ask questions, offer useful tips and share interesting links or quotations. Some people reveal a different side to themselves on Twitter: Tim Siedell’s Bad Banana Blog is one of my favourite sources of quirky creative inspiration, but on Twitter he’s a one-man comedy channel. You should follow Tim, it’ll brighten up your day.

Twitter is also a fun place to hang out and feel close to some of the great and good - on average, you’re more likely to get a response from an a list blogger via Twitter than e-mail. And I’ll confess to feeling slightly flattered to know that such luminaries as Steven Fry and Guy Kawasaki are following my Twitter updates - even though I know they do this to everyone who follows them, which means I’m just one among tens of thousands to them.

Don’t worry if this all sounds like a colossal waste of time. I resisted Twitter for about two years, until I finally gave it a shot and loved it. I ended up eating humble pie and blogging 6 Reasons Why I Was Wrong about Twitter. Probably more than any of the other networks on this list, you have to experience Twitter to ‘get it’.

To give you a flavour of Twitter, here are the responses I received yesterday afternoon, within a few minutes of posting the question ‘So what use is Twitter for creative people?’:

samismail - access to part of the cutting edge, instant informed opinion, building up a circle of people you can be inspired by etc

solobasssteve - we get to tell our story in bitesized chunks & hear others do the same. There’s solidarity in tweeting

grumblemouse - camaraderie

johndodds - It’s the creative industries’ backchannel and digital watercooler

kellyshaw - trusted people (who I follow) share inspirational content. Most of my rss feeds come from sources discovered on twitter

cmartell - spark generator

Jamiec - opening up channels with Likeminded *cough* people regardless of geographical location allowing for new discoveries on a daily basis

artbizness - For me it’s a few things. i) Time away from work to recover from burnout (re: your last blog ii) Poetic linguistic practise

artbizness - iii) displacement activity iv) an opportunity to connect with other creatives

CharlieGower - a distraction to improve tangental thinking

inventeleph - Multiple perspectives inspire new connections at a fast pace

johntunger - twitter is good for quick brainstorm responses to creative ideas… also for gauging interest in new ideas.

johntunger - the social/water cooler aspect of twitter is also good for creatives because limited. check in, then back to work.

ianshepherd - I read it over breakfast instead of a newspaper. It’s genuinely made t’internet about 100% more interesting for me

LakeMartinVoice - 4 bloggers maybe Twitter = liner notes to document / explain more fully a blog post, I do this on lakemartinvoice.com

johndodds - It’s a good way to get included in other people’s posts.

(Click on the links to follow these Twitter users.)

As you can see, Twitter is not always a place for great profundities. It’s about bite-sized chitchat, throwaway remarks and sharing a few moments with friends in a crowd. In short, it’s a bit like life.

If this post were an episode of Desert Island Discs for social networks, and I had to pick just one networks to keep, losing all the others - Twitter would be the one.

Three quarters of the Lateral Action team are regular Twitter users - click the links below to follow us:

Brian - copyblogger

Tamar - tamar

Me - markmcguinness

NETWORKS DESIGNED FOR CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS

The Behance Network

The Behance Network is an initiative from Scott Belsky’s Behance, a company on a mission to ‘help organize the creative world’. The network offers creative professionals a place to showcase their work to potential clients, as well as to connect with other creatives. It does this by making it easy for users to assemble an attractive portfolio of their work, organised by project, which is then available for visitors to browse. As a non-designer, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to assemble presentable projects using the Behance tools. (You can see my handiwork on my Behance profile.)

Having a nice profile is all well and good, but it’s a waste of time unless the right people are looking at it. It seems to me that this is where Behance really shines, as they have evidently invested a huge amount of time and effort in promoting the site to potential clients for their members. Founded in September 2007, traffic has snowballed to over 6 million page views per month. Crucially, Scott Belsky reports that over 90% of site traffic comes from non-members, boosting its credibility as a ’shop window’ for creative work. This graphic shows how the site functions - to judge from the logos on display illustrating site visitors, there are some serious players in the creative industries searching Behance for new talent.

When I asked Scott Belsky to describe the Behance Network, he emphasised the site’s focus on creative work and professional results, rather than just socialising:

With the Behance Network, our mission is to help organize creative people and their work. The Behance Network was not developed to be a “social network” but rather a content-centric organization engine that empowers creative people and teams to rapidly disseminate their projects, solicit feedback, and get found by some of the leading agencies, galleries, and recruiters in the world. Many top agencies now cite the Behance Network as their primary recruiting source.

The Behance Network has become a sort of content-centric “LinkedIn” for the creative community, as well as a top destination for enthusiasts to explore the latest work by leading creatives. A glimpse at the “most appreciated” projects in the network can provide a sense of the caliber of creative work in the network.

Scott Belsky, Founder, Behance

I asked Parris Whittingham, creator of one of the most popular portfolios on Behance, to describe his experience of the network:

I am a photographer and artist based in Manhattan, New York. I specialize in fine art wedding photography & multi-media design. Although I was skeptical to use Behance at first (considering there so many social networking sites out there), I quickly learned that Behance had created a platform like no other. Behance allows me to connect with a vast network of creatives from all over the world. Rather than simply “talk shop”, users are able to share their work and conversations tend to be centered on celebrating your fellow artist.

For me, the value of Behance is that it holds users to a set of unspoken professional standards. I will not post anything on the network unless I am truly confident in the work. I know this to be true for several other artists who use Behance as well. The Behance platform was clearly designed to focus on the artwork. This “less is more approach” makes Behance feel more like a Boutique than a catalog or meat market. For a person that just likes to be inspired by great design, amazing talent and professional presentation, Behance compliments my needs.

For new users I would suggest, taking some time to fully explore Behance. There are a lot of different sections on the platform. From portfolios, to tips, job postings, Behance Magazine…just check it out! Thanks for giving me an opportunity to share.
Parris Whittingham (Parris’ Behance Profile; Parris’ website)

Personally, I’m impressed by the stylish way in which Behance showcases its members’ portfolios, which include some amazing work. I’d love to meet more Behance users - come and say hi at Mark McGuinness on Behance.

Shapeshifters

Shapeshifters is the brainchild of Eric Poettschacher, a creative entrepreneur and consultant from Vienna, and an inspirational creative rock star if ever I met one. The shapeshifters website describes the organisation as ‘a knowledge agency for the global creative community’. And by global, they really do mean global.

Whereas many social networks start with the Internet and aim to amass as many users as possible, Eric and his colleagues took the opposite approach - they travelled the world meeting people face-to-face and building the network from the grassroots up. They didn’t ignore obvious creative hotspots such as London, New York and Tokyo, but they also travelled extensively in Asia, Africa and South America, areas of the world that are often overlooked when it comes to talk of the creative industries. They are deliberately growing the network slowly, and membership is by invitation. This emphasis on inclusiveness and face-to-face contact gives Shapeshifters a unique character and authenticity.

Here’s what Eric said when I asked him to describe the essence of Shapeshifters:

Our purpose is to connect professional creatives from all over the planet with the resources they require to get their things done. As a global broker for knowledge we operate on three distinct levels: On the “Creative Exchange” we foster peer-to-peer connections. This is a marketplace for our users to share resources and solve challenges. The “Creative Exchange” is free but invitation-only. With our service “High Touch” we actively matchmake co-creators sharing the same vision. One has the creative vision, the other has the necessary resources to make it real. Thirdly, there is “Global Reality Check“. It is a unique research and development service that allows innovators to get a truly global picture on a local creative challenge.
Eric Poettschacher, Founder, Shapeshifters

To learn more about Eric’s vision for Shapeshifters, watch this video interview. And for an example of how this vision translates into reality, read this story from Shapeshifters user Manu Kumar:

Well, I am an architect and artist and two years ago I had no idea how to use the internet effectively. After ten years working as a some kind of new nomad all over Europe and Asia I had the idea of setting up an international network of temporary workspaces for freelancers and creatives. Locations where you just go and work - plug & play offices - and most important to meet with the right people in these cities/countries. A network with REAL PEOPLE and REAL LOCATIONS - because without meeting personally all networking is in the long term useless!

When I started to turn that idea into reality - setting up TheBusinessClass.Net (BCN) network - I soon found out that it is very hard to find such kind of people. Searching the internet was like finding a needle in a haystack. So I studied all kind of social networks but couldn’t find any help. All these social networks seemed to me more like a collection of shiny profiles - good for for window-shopping, but not for practical work. To be fair - I was especially looking for partners outside the “western world” (about 80% of our planet!) because I think there is a huge potential in Asia, Africa, South America, rural areas … and all mayor social networks focus very much on the standard, the average, the western world - till now.

This was the moment when I came across Shapeshifters. A network where e.g. some designer from London asks a definite question about a special and new material and someone form Brazil or India has the answer and knows who can produce that for him and makes the contact … very direct, very simple - from human to human! A network on the personal level for creatives - a network for getting things done - a network for connecting. This was exactly what I was looking for!

When some Shapeshifters were searching for information and contacts in Berlin it was the time for me to get involved. I could easily help, because this is “my territory”. I regularly looked at the Shapeshifters pool of ideas and creatives and always found very interesting information for creatives from all parts of the world. After a short period “working” with the Shapeshifters community I found my first partner in the Mojave desert. A terrific location - the perfect place for the first BCN Drop-Out-Office and when I met Cecile (the lady now running that place) we found out that we have so much in common and we became friends. Since than I’ve found two further BCN-Partners through Shapeshifters, one in Manhattan/NY and one in Itaparica/Brazil. People and places that you only find if you travel the world by yourself, but hardly on the internet! In this first year BCN opened 6 locations world wide - 3 of them via Shapeshifters. This means that I’ve found 50% of my partners in this network - what a great help for me!!!

About High Touch: Shapeshifters now offers a service where they bring like-minded investors and creatives together. What counts most in this relationship is the personal contact and the same understanding how to interact and communicate in this world. I am very happy to be part of High Touch and I am really proud to be in the same boat with projects like a community centre in Zimbabwe giving rise to artists in Africa, or a project where students in Johannesburg are building their own school based on principles of sustainable architecture. Wow, what great projects, and so much for us to learn from!

Best wishes from cold and grey Berlin,
Manu Kumar, Initiator of TheBusinessClass.Net

likemind

likemind is simplicity itself - coffee and conversation with ‘people like you’. Every third Friday of the month, in cities as far flung as Stockholm, Tokyo and Melbourne, meetings take place in cafes as near to simultaneously as time zones will allow. How do you know that people will be ‘like you’? Well, if you visit the likemind website the chances are that you’re either involved in the creative industries or social media, and/or you’ve been recommended by somebody who is. So you’ll probably fit in just fine and be very glad you came.

likemind was born when Piers Fawkes and Noah Brier, two ‘Internet friends’, decided to meet up in a cafe, posting the details online, and inviting their other web contacts to join them. Snowballed - number of cities. Describe etiquette - more like a laid-back party than a business event. Sales pitches are frowned on, the emphasis is on getting to know people, finding out what they do, sharing ideas and experiences. It’s okay to share business cards, and it’s possible that concrete business opportunities may come out of likemind for you, but that’s not really the point. If you want to get the most out of likemind, treat it as a social event with people who happen to have similar professional interests. I sometimes find new clients through these meetings, but the main benefit to me is simply hanging around with others with similar interests, who are facing similar challenges and excited by similar opportunities. likemind is one of the things that helps keep me sane.

Whenever I try to persuade sceptical friends that the Internet is about people as much as technology, likemind is the first example I pick. Its web presence consists of the bare minimum needed to facilitate face-to-face meetups - no members or profiles, just a map showing locations, and RSS feeds telling you the date, time and location of your local likemind. After a couple of visits you might not even need the website - likemind is always on the third Friday of the month, and in London at least, the time and place rarely change.

When I asked Noah to explain likemind for Lateral Action readers, he said there wasn’t a lot to explain:

I think the purpose of likemind is to just get interesting people together for some coffee and a chat. It’s nice to talk about a great vision, but I think the real beauty of likemind is that its exactly what people make of it (luckily, so many people seem to make so much of it).
Noah Brier, Co-Founder, likemind

likemind London is graciously hosted by Jamie Coomber and Charles Olive. This is how Jamie differentiates likemind from other informal networking groups:

There is an ever increasing demand for networks in London ranging from uber tech geek outs, mobile meet ups and open talks about music in the media. Likemind London is the one which meets early in the morning and isn’t targeted to a specific interest group, just people who are naturally curious.
Jamie Coomber, likemind London

Clive De Freitas is a New Yorker who I met at likemind London a few months ago:

There’s something comforting about coffee and conversation, especially in the context of a likemind gathering. For a New Yorker like me to find himself in a new city like London, let alone a new country, and just stumble upon interesting and creative people having stimulating conversations about ideas and projects…there’s an automatic connection and inclusion in a community…it’s a physical hyperlink of sorts to a social network of like minds.
Clive de Freitas, Brand Strategist, Market Researcher & Innovation Consultant

For more about the likemind vibe, have a look at this recent feature in the New York Times. Or simply turn up at the next likemind near you, you’ll be made very welcome.

DeviantART

DeviantART has been running since 2000 and bills itself as ‘the largest art community in the world’, with 8.7 million registered active users. It covers a very wide range of art forms, including various visual and digital arts, crafts and the written word. Users can share their work and put it up for sale via collections. There are also extensive forums as well as networking features linked to user profiles. As with Behance, there is some stunning work on display, particularly in the popular collections area.

I spoke to DeviantART CEO and co-founder, Angelo Sotira:

If I could sum up the spirit of the site I would say ‘DeviantART loves you’. It’s the most emotional, sensitive, caring place on the Internet, somewhere you can put yourself and your work out there and you won’t be too harshly judged. It’s also the largest platform for artists to be seen and exposed to potential clients and employers. DeviantART who have secured high-profile deals via the site include Mark Brooks who was picked up by Marvel Comics, Space Coyote who has done work for The Simpsons, and =fsk whose Line Rider drawings have attracted 25 million views and been turned into a game for the Nintendo DS and Wii.

On a site like Facebook you are likely to spend most of your time networking with people you already know, but on DeviantART you have the opportunity to make new contacts within a focused society that embraces artistic deviance of all kinds. As well as operating on an enormous scale, DeviantART caters for a wide range of ages and levels of ability. So we have kids of 13 who are just starting out, seasoned professionals making a living from their work, and large numbers of grandparents as well. Our internal mission is to foster their creative genius, at whatever stage they are at on their journey.

Next year we will be launching DeviantART Groups, which will allow creative entrepreneurs to create their own social networks using the DeviantART platform. Every artist is an entrepreneur — at DeviantART we provide the tools and community to support their creative and business development.”
Angelo Sotira, CEO, DeviantART

One of the things that struck me while browsing through the collections on DeviantART was the number of tutorials on display. There is evidently a culture of teaching and mentoring among DeviantART members, which is a big attraction of the site for art director and longtime DeviantART user Waldemar Wegelin:

DeviantArt is an online web community I joined back in 2001. I used it regulary in the beginning, uploading my early design efforts and getting the opinion of other artists and designers. Nowadays it has a super broad range of users and there’s lots of stuff on there that you won’t find anywhere else. I use it mainly for my personal projects, only rarely stuff I’ve done to answer a brief. I haven’t been uploading lately but working on a few new submissions.

The greatest thing is that users are willing to critique your work and help you progress. I can use DeviantArt to experiment with various styles that I can’t use in my day-to-day job, as they have little commercial appeal. Another great thing for me is browsing through the rich archives, you find stuff on concepts that are really unique, imagery that isn’t found on flickr, Getty, or Google. So it serves as a source of inspiration as well as a playground to try out stuff.

As a social networking site DA is completely different. In the essence of it, I think, it is filled with people who love to create things, whether they are digital-paintings, photography, poetry or something completely random. Other social sites are about interacting but DA is equally about contributing you skill and craft to it. If you compare it to other art communities like shadowness, it’s less elitist, and the range of artists from all levels is amazing. It starts with complete newbies right up to the high level of uber illustrators. And everyone lives happy together.
Waldemar Wegelin (Waldemar’s DeviantArt profile; Waldemar’s Blog)

Ning

Ning.com Isn’t one network but a free, user-friendly platform that allows you to create your own network. As a result, Ning has evolved into a veritable constellation of networks. The beauty of it is that you can search through the directory to find something that suits you. Search Ning for ‘creative’ and it offers you an extensive menu of networks. And if you can’t find anything quite right for you, you can always start your own.

Like Buck Creacy, professional storyteller extraordinaire. If you’re thinking you haven’t met many professional storytellers, then neither had Buck - until he discovered Ning.

I have been telling stories either as a hobby or professionally most of my life. I thought I was a unique bird, the last of the Dodos. Simply, no one close by told stories, well not like me. I joined the 2500 members of NSN and the Kentucky Storytelling Association. Still not many storytellers nearby to talk shop with, troubleshoot problems, and hone each other’s skills. Enter the ProfessionalStoryteller.NING, suddenly, created by my friend Dianne de Las Casas. Now I am surrounded by hundreds of tellers who are facing the same problems I am, venues, marketing, craft professionalism, product development, business practices and on and on. Now I have huge family, with whom I am constantly in contact. What fun! We chat, swap tales, ideas, have you seen the work we have done in the Marketing Group? All of it open and sharing and now it is growing beyond the borders of the USA. We have storytellers sharing their ideas and stories and concerns across many languages. It is wonderful and our community is either helping them or they are helping me. This is what a Community is supposed to be like. This is what all Artists should be doing. This is beautiful inclusion.
Buck Creacy, Professional Storyteller (Buck’s own website)

This inspiring story has been enabled by Ning’s flexible platform, which allows non-coders to assemble a network custom-built for their needs. While I was researching creative groups on LinkedIn, I found that one of the largest groups, the Creativity Champions, had actually decamped to Ning because of its flexibility, as group founder Tom Tresser explained to me:

I started the LinkedIn group as a way to reach creativity practitioners around the globe and so far over 1,020 have joined. The goal is to spark a conversation around advancing creativity as a global priority. But there were no collaboration or community tools or P2P abilities so i set up Creativity Champions at Ning, which has a rich array of easy to install and navigate functions: forums, chat, videos, images, messaging and “friend-connecting.” (A few weeks ago LinkedIn added a discussion feature to their groups). In addition, the nav bars on either side of the ning frame allow the administrator to drop in any number of freely available widgets to enhance content. I’ve added news feeds, a plug for my own book and my favorite creativity-related presentations from slideshare.net, another great P2P site.
Tom Tresser, Creativity Champions Ning (Tom’s own website)

Your Local Creative Networking Group

Depending on where you live, there may well be networking groups for creative professionals in your town or city.

Here in London we’re lucky enough to be spoilt for choice in this respect - as well as visiting my local likemind chapter, I try to keep Friday mornings free for Social Media Cafe - a great place to meet socially oriented geeks and people (like me) from other fields who are keen to explore the creative and collaborative possibilities of Virtual Florence. Creative Coffee Club is another excellent meet up with an mix of people from all kinds of creative fields. We also have Meshminds, which combines Facebook-style online networking with live parties, gallery showings and other events. And I’ve heard about so many more similar networks that I could probably spend my entire week drinking coffee, sipping wine and setting the creative world to rights, if I didn’t have plenty of other things to be getting on with.

The vibe at these events is very similar to likemind - coffee (or beer/wine in the evenings) and chat, with the emphasis on the exchange of ideas first and business cards second. Some are more tech oriented, and some have more creative, media and artistic types.

The Social Media Cafe is a loose association of people interested in new ways of working together. Our meetups every Friday are different in that there’s no structure, people just come and meet new people, drink coffee and chat. What happens then is up to them - I wanted to create something that emulated online social networking but in real life. I’m testing out the hypothesis that facilitating the building of richer relationships has benefits for everyone involved. What’s surprised me most is the diversity of the network, we have people from web startups, established tech firms, specialists in mobile, old-school media, agencies of all complexions, freelancers of various kinds, film-makers, writers, musicians and artists.
Lloyd Davis, Founder, Social Media Cafe/Tuttle Club

If you don’t know of any creative networking groups in your local area, have a rummage around on some of the online networks listed above - you may unearth some interesting groups. Meetup.com is another good place to look for groups organised around your interests. And if there’s nothing there already, why not consider setting one up yourself? Likemind was born of an on-line friendship between Piers and Noah, who agreed to meet in a cafe and invited some of their online friends. Several of the sites on this list will make it easy for you to contact others in your area. If you meet in a cafe there’s no cost and very little organisation involved - what have you got to lose?

BONUS NETWORK - The Blogosphere

In true Spinal Tap tradition, this Top 10 goes all the way up to 11. When you publish your first blog post, you join a network of millions. Estimates of the size of the blogosphere vary, but even if there are only a few hundred thousand regularly active blogs, that should be plenty of contacts for anyone.

Obviously, the galaxy of blogs isn’t a clearly defined network like the rest of this list. And there’s much more to blogging than networking, so it doesn’t tell the whole story to describe the blogosphere as a social network. But if you’re looking for a sense of identity (or personal brand), creative inspiration, professional opportunities, collaborators, partners and sheer enjoyment, then writing a blog is hard to beat. And unlike the rest of the networks on the list, writing a blog (or creating any kind of vibrant content-driven website) on your own domain is a way of creating something that is truly your space. There is no danger of becoming someone else’s user-generated content.

Blogging for creative people is a long story, and one for another time. But if you’re interested in the relationship between blogs and social networking, have a look at this post by Darren Rowse, where he elaborates on Chris Brogan’s concept of ‘home bases’ (like your blog or website) and ‘outposts’ (like social networking sites).

Next Step - Download Chris Brogan’s Free E-Book ‘Personal Branding for the Business Professional’

If l’ve done anything to whet your appetite for social networking, then do yourself a big favour and download Chris Brogan’s excellent free e-book, Personal Branding for the Business Professional. At 15 pages it won’t take you long to read and it’s chock full of solid advice from an acknowledged expert.

Thank You to All the Contributors to This Post

I had to do a lot of networking to write this article on networking. It’s testament to the spirit of collaboration and sharing (with a healthy dose of self-promotion) on these networks that so many people - many of whom I was contacting for the first time - were so generous in coming forward with thoughtful comments, useful advice and suggestions for people I ’should talk to’. So I’d like to say a big thank you to all the contributors, and encourage you to visit their sites and profiles, they are a fascinating and very talented bunch of people.

I had a lot of fun researching this post and spending virtual time with these people - there are plenty more like them, waiting for you to meet them.

You and Your Networks

What part do social networks play in your creative and professional life?

What are your experiences of the networks on this list?

Have I missed out your favourite network? If so, please tell us Where it is, How you use it and What benefits it offers creative professionals.

What tips can you offer people who are new to social networking?

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a poet, creative coach and co-founder of Lateral Action. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.