If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you’ve probably heard people talking about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
These online “social networks” make it possible for people to connect via the Internet, which is great if you don’t have the time or energy to connect with dozens, or even hundreds, of people who want your attention.
I’m on several social networks. You can find me on Twitter (Facebook, on Smaller Indiana and on LinkedIn.
You would think that with all the time I spend on my social networks, I wouldn’t get out much.
You’d be wrong.
I’ve actually been able to leverage my social networks into real-life networks, filled with real-life people. These are people who are more than just online buddies that I play games with or do goofy stuff with on Facebook. These are real people who own their own businesses, or work in large corporations.
I’ve been able to use these networks to create opportunities for my own business, find speaking opportunities, and make connections for other people.
A lot of these connections would have never happened if it hadn’t been for my social networking. I connected with people offline, before I connected with them online. And I was able to enhance and grow the relationship through my online efforts.
Think of your typical business relationship. You meet someone at an event like At The Top. You exchange business cards and promise to get together for lunch or coffee. A couple weeks go by, and you receive an email, reminding you that you met, and would you like to meet for coffee next week. Next week’s no good, but how about three weeks from today? That sounds fine, so you meet, do the typical small talk — where you live, where you went to school, how you got to where you are — and you’re out of time before you ever got to why you actually wanted to meet. So you arrange to get together next month, and you finally get the relationship going.
But what if you could connect online first? You meet at the event, exchange business cards, and then follow the person on Twitter and friend them on Facebook. You find out where they went to school, get an idea of where they live, and see that they went to college with one of your high school friends. You catch up on that person via Facebook email, and keep in touch via Twitter. You share some articles of interest with the other person, and they do the same for you.
Then, when you have coffee three weeks later, you already know more about the person. In fact, you’ve enjoyed interacting with this person online, you could even say you’re friends. You have a level of trust in place, you share some of the same experiences, and as a result, you’re immediately able to get down to business and do what you needed to do in the first place.
Basically, all the relationship building stuff that typically happens at that first meeting instead happened online. And thanks to the power of things like Facebook and Twitter, you were able to find out more stuff about the other person (and vice versa) than you ever could have done in 10 meetings.
Before you dismiss the effectiveness of social networking, ask some of your colleagues or some of the people you meet at At The Top this month about how they’ve been able to use it. Look for me, Karen Scharf, or Lindsay Manfredi, and ask us what we’ve been able to do with social networking just in the last couple of years.
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