By Stephen Fink, Managing Editor, WCBSTV.com

A favorite business management book of mine that I like to pick up and read over again from time to time is Keith Ferrazzi’s “Never Eat Alone,” an uplifting primer that encourages meaningful networking and maintaining productive relationships with people you meet – both professionally and personally – throughout your life. The stress of management, especially these days in our industry, can certainly cause even the most sociable people persons to find solace in being anti-social Scrooges.

The book is a nice reminder as to why that’s the wrong path to take in seeking success.

What I find really neat about the book, though, is how it not only applies to relationships between people, but for our purposes, it also makes sense when it comes to finding success for our news sites. In business, we find success in reaching out to anyone anywhere who can significantly improve the circumstances we seek to build on, be it for ourselves or for our business. We are only limited by our own efforts when it comes to networking successfully.

On TV or radio, our ability to attract an audience and build relationships with new viewers only goes as far as the viewing area reaches. The beauty of the digital news era lies in that there are no boundaries to the audiences we can seat and the relationships we can forge. Just like networking as individuals, online we can network as far as the World Wide Web stretches.

And I’ve found the real success lies in networks networking networks.

When I first moved into the digital medium as a local news Web producer, I noticed that the real efforts in traffic building for local broadcast news Web sites came from reaching out strictly to that local broadcast audience. What I realized was that if I stuck to the practice of limiting my online audience to my station’s viewing area only, I’d be ignoring the massive chunk of traffic I could attract from everywhere else.

That being said, no, a person in Beaverdale, Pennsylvania won’t be interested in the local crime beat of Tampa, Florida. But consider the potential of some of your most interesting local news stories as if they were YouTube viral videos. Viral videos are proof that people don’t really care where the story comes from, they just care about the content of it. We saw it in the viral “wedding dance” video that became both a YouTube and news sensation just about everywhere recently. It made no difference that the dancing couple came from Minnesota. The video and the story behind it was what made it so newsworthy.

In the digital news era, potentially viral news stories are worth the attention of more than just your local viewing area. And if you network to other news networks, you’re not only helping that site with content, but you’ll make yours known to an outside audience you may not have reached before. There are countless mediums: Search engine news networks like Yahoo and Google; digital news aggregation networks like The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; interactive digital news aggregators like Fark, Digg, and Reddit; social media networks like Facebook and Twitter; and even in what’s been a growing trend with cable news network sites like CNN and FoxNews, which are often seen linking to stories from local market sites of other networks just to get a piece of that content.

It’s up to site producers and managers of course, to forge those relationships with other networks. It’s effective, it’s fun, and it’ll build your traffic like never before. Believe me, networks networking networks…works!