Business Networking: How to Work the "Virtual" Room

By Susan RoAne, The Mingling Maven®

The chitchat about chat rooms has exploded since I first wrote about it in 1995. We now have several generations of people whose virtual socializing, conversing and networking has exceeded their real time of each activity. With that, we have lost a lot of our personal touch.

The on-line world not only gives us a new type of room to work, we also get thousands of possible "rooms" in which to chat about anything, anywhere, anytime. It's a room without the boundaries of walls or time, yet there are rules and boundaries of better behavior to be observed.

There are myriad stories of people finding long-lost relatives, loves, friends, even romance (one of my friends married a chat room friend!), of seniors whose frailties keep them homebound, of those who stay in touch with a grandchild or find a community on-line, of those suffering from similar symptoms, or those who find the on-line support group or just pals. For the record, the largest growing segment of the on-line world are senior citizens. Chat rooms can and do create a community...a virtual one.

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