David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and founder of Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be seen and heard on Cranky Geeks, KQED, Green 960, and ABC Radio.

Growing your social network. So many are obsessed with it. It's fun to watch our numbers grow and to get all that attention. But for those of us that rely on it for business, we must be constructive, targeted, and effective about how we approach social networking. That's because a well built social network becomes a fantastic channel for personal and business promotions.

I delved into more than 80 stories of people who have effectively grown their social network either in great numbers or strategically within their industry. What follows are ten successful network growing techniques and the 12 inspiring stories of the people who made them happen.

Let art become life

Barret Swatek is the star of the online comedy series, "My Two Fans," about an average single girl who rebounds from a broken heart with the help of her two fans. Having blown all their budget on production, "My Two Fans" had no money for advertising, so off a friend's recommendation, Swatek decided to start Twittering as her character, Kate Maxwell (@KateMaxwell). To get some fodder for Twittering and to find her audience, Swatek began following businesses and people that could relate to her show, such as dating sites, single women, girl power groups, fan clubs, etc.







In just six weeks, Kate Maxwell/Barret Swatek has collected more than 500 followers. More importantly, she's being followed by key industry players at Sony, Lionsgate, and NBC to name a few. But Swatek Twitters because she loves how people respond to her character and it really inspires her as a writer. "The key to getting more followers and helping the show to grow is to constantly and consistently be funny and to always tweet in my character's voice," Swatek said.

Seed your network

For six months and with only 150 inactive members, the LinkToCharlotte LinkedIn group was languishing. LinkToCharlotte's goal has always been to connect local businesses and people in the Charlotte, NC area. Founder Andrew Kaplan decided it was time to juice the membership of his group. In June 2008, he reached out to local influencers who could attract others to his local network.

Already having ties with professional sports teams, tourism, and political advisors, Kaplan sent out personal invites to their respective marketing departments to join the group. Quickly seeing the benefits of being part of Kaplan's local industry network, they in turn sent invites from their lists to join his network as well. Today, LinkToCharlotte's LinkedIn group has grown to 2,000, plus it has expanded to include groups on the NING platform, Facebook, and Twitter.

Create super users

Glogster is a social network where users can create interactive posters, or "glogs." Glogs are very personal, and the Glogster team gets to know a lot about its users. Realizing that some of their users are more avid and opinionated than others, Glogster decided to build a deeper connection with those users by creating a group of super users, or Glogster Commandos, explained Andrew Connelly, Glogster's Director of Business Development.







After running a series of successful contests, Glogster offered regular users the opportunity to become a commando member. Glogster views its commandos as partners with its development team. Thoughts and ideas that have come from the group have included what prizes to give away (iPods! Glogster bought 100 of them) to what they don't like about the site (Commandos hated the banner ads so Glogster took them down immediately). "This is an exclusive group that is growing with us to help us make the best, most desirable product," Connelly said.

Offer advice

Questions are asked to be answered. And sometimes we can offer advice, thus answering questions that have yet to be formed.

Gary Unger, author of "How to Be a Creative Genius (in five minutes or less)", began searching forum postings and Q&A on LinkedIn for ways he could help. Asking for nothing in return, he provided unique advice for many people such as Francisco Hurtado of Spain who publicly asked in LinkedIn's Q&A forum, "How would you promote welding products?" Unger answered, "Build some structure like a really cool art piece at your facility using all your equipment and welding types. Take photos of the process. Put it in a brochure. Mail it out. Also, do a miniature one of that idea that can travel to trade shows." Hurtado and many others have been so appreciative of Unger taking the initiative to offer such thoughtful advice that Unger has received many connection requests and recommendations to connect.

Julie Isaac is also an advice maven. When she joined Twitter (@WritingSpirit) she realized she needed to give people a reason to start following her, so she started tweeting daily creativity tips for writers. With more than 15,000 followers, many of whom retweet her advice every day, Isaac's parlayed that popularity into a larger mailing list, an upcoming ebook, and a live weekly writing salon called #writechat (Sundays 12p -3p PST). For Isaac's personal life, the Twitter interaction has resulted in an evolutionary leap. "Twitter hasn't just helped me connect with other people, it's helped me connect more deeply with myself. I'm not the same shy and quiet woman I was when I first tiptoed onto Twitter. I'm more confident. I'm more me," Isaac said.

Build your network before you launch your business

Before launching MyWorkButterfly, a site for working moms and moms wanting to return to the workforce, Bradi Nathan and Terry Starr conducted a National Moms Survey on Facebook. The two women pushed the survey out to everyone they knew and asked those people to push it out to everyone they knew.







The goal of the survey was to find out what moms would want from a moms social network. The feedback they got from that survey became the playbook for all the content and design of MyWorkButterfly. Elements such as job listings, personalized welcome messages, and even the order of the drop down menu items came directly from that survey. In addition, those initial survey takers became MyWorkButterfly's first users and since they could see their voice was heard, they quickly became very supportive of the site. After launching only three months ago, MyWorkButterfly claims 2,000 members and 40,000+ page views a month with over 6 minutes per visit.

Parlay your hobby into a business opportunity

Any good salesman will tell you the trick to getting trust is to get the potential client to like you first. Life sciences attorney Libby Baney of B&D Consulting decided to build that trust by joining a dog lovers' group on Facebook. She became involved in the group by posting pictures of her dog and commenting on other users' photos. While she did enjoy participating in the group, she wanted Facebook to help her develop professional opportunities.

Baney mined users' profiles and found many were in the fields of medical technology and pharmaceuticals. Not wanting to infiltrate the dog related group with business pitches, Baney friended these people and then used her Facebook status update to let people know about her work as a life sciences attorney. The updates seen by these new dog loving friends has resulted in more than ten different professional conversations. One dog lover in particular turned out to be the CEO of a medical device company. He saw her status update, asked to meet with her, and now her firm is representing his company.

Selective networking

Managing the marketing for Motion Golf, Sarah Greenwood was only interested in growing her client's social network with golf enthusiasts. She began searching for golf trade associations and non-profits that were on Twitter. She mined the lists of people they were following looking for amateur golfers, golf pros, golf companies, golf blogs, golf writers, and media outlets. This required a lot of research, clicking through and reading bios of many users. To get followed back it was important for her to read posts, interact, and start a dialogue. She quickly realized that those who chose not to follow her back were not interested in interacting with her. So she unfollowed those people.

It's been a lot of work says Greenwood, but after three weeks she's set up four cross-marketing projects with other companies, and had conversations with two tour players, four national media writers, and many golf bloggers. Today, the company's Twitter account (@MotionGolf) has more than 1,400 highly targeted followers.

Give something away that's customized for the user

One of my first experiences with this technique was when Andy Sernovitz, author of "Word of Mouth Marketing" sent me a luggage tag that had my business card laminated inside. I had met Sernovitz a few weeks earlier at an event and had handed him my card. I assumed he would just keep it. I didn't expect him to send it back. On the other side of the luggage tag (the backside of my business card) was an ad for his book and some advice that explained what he just did: "Word of Mouth Tip #33: Do something special and surprising."

Another great example of personalized customization was what Dr. David Klein, a San Diego chiropractor did at a WordCamp conference in San Francisco. He had a representative photograph people holding up a sign of their dream profession along with their Web address. In turn, a cartoonist drew a caricature of that person in that profession. Here's mine: (While I thought this was a great idea, since his business was local, he should have done it in San Diego, not San Francisco.)













Personally greet new members

Veronica Alvarez is the founder of FertilityTies, an online community for those trying to conceive or going through infertility. Since fertility is a very sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable subject, Alvarez went out of her way to greet all new members personally through the site. "I believe this was instrumental for new members to feel genuinely welcomed and to have a higher inclination to come back and visit the site," said Alvarez. Soon after, one of the site's fertility doctors helped out with the personal greetings. And a few months after that, the site's veteran members continued the good will by greeting new members themselves.

The warmth of the community has become infectious and last Christmas, some members got together and surprised one of the site's fertility doctors with a personalized gift, plus a gift basket to Alvarez for building the community to help them through their difficulty journey to conception. With 85,000+ monthly visitors and 20% monthly growth, Alvarez still makes as much time as possible to greet new members, plus gladly sees other members join in as well. As Alvarez chimes, "We'll continue to grow one warm greeting at a time!"

Offer to give something away on YOUR birthday

"Native American culture - among others - has a custom of giving to others on your birthday, instead of receiving," explained Leigh Shulman. Continuing that custom, Shulman asked her blog readers, "How can I help?" She offered to help anyone in any way that didn't cost money. And many readers took her up on it. One asked for help planning a beach vacation. A Spanish speaking person learning English wanted a writing assignment to improve her English. And one person just wanted Shulman to smile at everyone she saw. The net result has been more readers to her blog, new Twitter followers, and many new personal connections, which says Shulman is the main reason she engages in social networking.

Hungry for some more?

I've got more! Read about two more bonus techniques: "Own a word" and "Participate in LinkedIn." But more importantly, I'm sure you've got some fantastic stories of your success with growing your social network. I'd love to hear it. Please add it to the comments.

What I've learned from all these stories is that success doesn't need to be of the Ashton Kutcher 1 million followers level. We can all gain success with much smaller numbers. Success is about being able to make your service or product visible in times of need. If you can do that just once, then you've created an effective social network.

More social media resources from Mashable:

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Sveta