Networking -un grande viaggio inizia con un piccolo passo

  Greetings from Italy. The above Italian phrase in the title of this blog, which means 'a large journey begins with a little step' describes how I am currently feeling about my networking efforts in Italy. I feel that I have made a bit of a start but have a long way to go.

Having just moved to a new country this networking section of the BAPP course is particularly pertinent to me. Although I have always valued relationships with my family and friends and always kept in touch with professional acquaintances, I have preferred to maintain contact face to face or, when that wasn't possible, to speak on the phone. I have not been a fan of virtual communication, so have never really engaged with social networking sites. Now that I am in a different country, however, I can fully appreciate the need to do so.

Suddenly I find myself Skyping and FaceTiming people back in the UK, so as not to lose touch with my connections there, and also joining sites such as LinkedIn, Meetup and Anglo-info in an attempt to make new connections here in Italy.

I have found the latter two sites particularly helpful. I use Anglo-info to find out about how things work in Italy for British people living here. It has information on matters such as health and taxation. It also keeps me informed about events in the region and has contact details for various societies, schools, theatres etc. 

 I am currently working peripatetically, delivering dance workshops to some of the International schools in France and Italy. In the future I hope to connect, not only with the International schools , but also with the ordinary Italian schools and arrange school performance opportunities, so this site will be useful in finding the schools' contact details.

I use Meetup to join specific groups that are of interest to me where I can meet like-minded people. Unfortunately there are no groups close by, so I am having to travel to socialise with the people in the groups that I have joined. I am considering setting up a local Meetup group for people interested in the arts, as the only one I have found is a two hour drive away.

Networking in a foreign country presents several challenges, not least of which is the language barrier. Until I moved to Italy I didn't speak a word of Italian. As the region I am in, Liguria, is in close proximity to the Cote d'Azur, a region of France that I have previously lived in and where there are many English people and most French people have some level of spoken English, I naively assumed the same would be true for this region of Italy. It is not the case. It was therefore quite difficult initially to make friends and contacts and I found that I need to use my French, which is a little rusty, in order to communicate.

 I tried to connect with other expats by writing a post on the expat forum and the anglo-info forum to see if anyone local got in touch. Unfortunately, the people who replied lived quite a distance from me.

So far the only people I have found, in the town in which I am living, who have a good grasp of English, are those either studying it, or teaching it, at the language schools. I have consequently enrolled at one of these schools to learn Italian. It has proven to be a very good thing to do, as, not only am I learning the language, but I have also made some more friends and through them, have been introduced to some useful contacts.

Another aspect to consider when networking in a foreign country is that of cultural differences. In the UK, for example, I gave many Musical Theatre workshops, but in both France and Italy they don't have a history of this in their culture, so I had to take this into consideration when contacting people with regard to workshops to make sure that I was targeting them correctly. 

When I first started looking at which social networking sites might be useful to join I was astounded by how many there are. I had heard of popular sites like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and Twitter, but wasn't aware of the existence of all the others I discovered. Below is a link to one of the sites I found helpful in giving a brief description of some of the networking sites I found:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/40-most-popular-social-networking-sites-world?page=1 

I intend to take a look at Xing which is supposed to be a good professional networking site that operates in Italy.

Ethical Considerations

I have written, in a previous blog, about my reservations concerning the use of social networking sites. I have so far not joined Facebook because I disagree strongly with the fact that they can use your photos and information and pass it on to third parties. I recently found this link via a blog on the subject:

http://asmp.org/fb-tos#.VJK0M74-DR1

I have also spoken to other dance teachers who said that they have stopped using it, because they were constantly bombarded by friend requests from their pupils and they simply didn't have the time to correspond with them all, but found that the pupils were offended if their friend request was denied. I wouldn't have the time to respond to all my pupils on Facebook, so again this is another reason for not using it.


Before doing some research on networking, I was aware of the popularity of Facebook and realised that it was a good way to advertise a business or service. I was not aware of the statistics regarding the extent of its use for advertising, however, until I found the site below:

http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/


In the future I may have to consider using Facebook for advertising purposes. I still would not have a personal page because of the reasons mentioned above.

As an examiner I also have to be extremely careful about the online image I am presenting. I have already written about this in a previous blog.

At one of the BAPP Skype sessions concern was expressed by one of the dancers who had discovered some old dance photographs of herself on the web. Someone had got hold of them from her Facebook account and she wasn't aware of it until she 'googled' herself and these photographs appeared She was concerned that a potential employer might see these photographs and get the wrong impression of her because they are out of date and do not represent her as she is now.

I tried 'googling' myself and was amazed by the extent of information that came up and the way the internet had managed to link to newspaper articles, Youtube and all sorts of sites that I had visited in the past. It is quite frightening to think that anybody, anywhere, can access your personal information.

I am currently very torn between the need to increase my online presence professionally and the need to try to keep my personal information private.