KEY POINTS:
An entrepreneur is targeting his new website to impact Kiwi business networking as Facebook has social networking.
"It's Facebook for professionals," says West Australian John Wall, founder of recently launched www.howgood.co.nz.
The site has been designed around a customer rating system for service providers in high-risk, low-trust industries, such as real estate or financial planning, where monetary stakes are high.
With house sales slumping and job losses accelerating, reputation has never been more important to service industry professionals, Wall says.
"The only way you're going to survive and prosper in this environment is to build strong networks and trade on the power of your good reputation."
Unfortunately, however, he says New Zealanders aren't good natural networkers.
Kiwis don't like to blow their own trumpets - it's seen as socially unacceptable compared with the proactive self-promotion common in the US, says Wall.
While Australians are getting better at it, New Zealanders are "very, very polite" and reluctant to make someone feel uncomfortable by asking if they can contact them again in the future to do business together. "They find that quite a confronting thing to do."
Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett disagrees, saying New Zealanders are good networkers because of the society's egalitarian nature, and Kiwis should be wary of business networking opportunities on the internet.
He thinks it is preferable to take advantage of face-to-face networking opportunities instead.
Graham Southwell, of BNI (Business Network International), says of the 39 countries his group has been operating in over the past 23 years, it has achieved better market penetration in New Zealand than anywhere else since it started here in 1999.
He says there are other similar sites here and overseas, and sees online business networking as "the way of the future". But he says there will always be a place for face-to-face networking, seeing both as complementary.
Like its social networking counterpart Facebook, How Good operates on a permission-based system whereby professionals can stay in contact with one another.
They have their own profile page and a blog to communicate with customers, and can also view page statistics and compare their customer ratings with those of their competitors.
They can also build up contact lists of other trustworthy professionals, and can tap into other clients' networks.
People looking to hire can research by industry and location, then compare customers' ratings to find the professional they want. A service provider has 48 hours to check a review before it is posted online and can contest it if they have not, in fact, done business with the reviewer. If it's a genuine complaint, the service provider can use this period before it is posted online to rectify the situation.
"People are badmouthing service providers in cafes all over the country anyway," says Wall. "The site gives providers the opportunity to know about and fix it - to have a level of control over their reputation."
About 700 members are on the site, which gets around 200 visitors a day. They spend an average of four minutes and 40 seconds - as measured by Google analysts. Wall is aiming for 15,000 visitors a month by the end of the year.
Southwell says the referral marketing industry is breaking new ground as people recognise its strength, with businesses focusing on co-operating together instead of competing.
