Using Channels for Effective Networking  

• Why Channels?
• Set-Up
• Channel types & applications.
• What's my channel strategy?

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WHY CHANNELS?

Think of channels as the automated networking engines for your primary interests.  

Most people have many facets - personal, social, and professional - they want to shine with. You can create a Gleanr channel for all your facets, separately and strategically automating how each streams content and represents you to public and/or discrete audiences. After set-up, success is easy: all you do is glean content into your channels, casually or purposefully, as part of your daily workflow. Gleanr does the rest for you.

SET-UP

Click through this presentation for a lightning visual tour of channel creation...

CHANNEL TYPES & APPLICATIONS

When you register for Gleanr, we create a default Personal Channel for you.  Where you can stream publicly and store completely privately (no members-contributors allowed).

You can create as many Public Channels as you wish for free, and invite member-contributors to join you.  For a modest monthly fee you can also have a completely Private Channel, or a Premium Channel where you and colleagues can create public and private content together. Finally, you can also purchase a PPV Channel where you, with colleagues if you wish, can create content that is public, private, or pay-per-view, the last either by single-item purchase or by subscription as you wish.  

 Regardless of topic or channel type, any channel can be one or all of the following for you:

• Content Aggregator:  Glean important content on any topic, simply to have it secure, indexed, organized, and searchable in one place. Make everything private if you want, or make some of it public (indexed by search engines) to build your credibility and discoverability in relation to the topic. 
• Brain Trust:  For a company or working group, invite key colleagues to join your Channel to contribute to a collective content stream.  In Premium channels contributors can easily keep sensitive material private while gleaning select material publicly to simultaneously enhance the discoverability of the individuals and the company. 
• Publicity Mill:  Once you've connected your Twitter account to a channel, anything you (or invited contributors) glean publicly into this channel will be tweeted so that people can follow your stream.  Also, invited contributors can add their Twitter accounts to the Channel so that anything they contribute is also tweeted on their accounts.
• Social Engine:  Connect your channel with your Facebook account so that anything you glean publicly into that channel automatically refreshes your Facebook status (see our How To for this).
• Professional Engine:  Connect your channel with your LinkedIn account so that anything you glean publicly into that channel automatically refreshes your LinkedIn network updates (see our How To for this).

WHAT'S MY CHANNEL STRATEGY?

We recommend:

• using your Personal Channel for general purposes (gathering and sharing content that's just interesting, storing information that you don't want to lose, etc, etc).
• creating a few special-purpose Channels to serve your primary interests.   
• Be strategic!  Gleanr is a powerful, flexible platform that can be a research assistant, content aggregator, knowledge guild, presence amplifier, publicity mill, etc, all according to your personal networking goals.