Young Successful Entrepreneur

Picture by .02c

People tend to dislike the word “network” because it just seems like you’re adding a person to your contact list so that he or she can help you in the future.  There have been many posts and speeches given about “building relationships” and not merely just “networking.”  To sum it up in one phrase - you must give before you can take.

If you want to build your personal brand, then you should be using sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter; however, people take this the wrong way and go overboard in trying to make connections.  It troubles me to see sites advocating Following Exchanges and other sites that are meant for the sole purpose of expanding your LinkedIn connections.  People who use these easy-way-out tools are missing the entire point of expanding your network.

Look up the most prestigious people that you can on LinkedIn.  How many connections do they have?  Lets look up Guy Kawasaki for example.  He only has 232 connections on LinkedIn.  I’ll bet that he absolutely knows these 232 people in his network and values them as business contacts.  I myself have more than 500, but I have not used Lion 500 or TopLinked at all.

It’s always good to get more readers on your blog, more followers on Twitter, or more connections on LinkedIn, but you must do them for the right reasons.  Are you merely just expanding your network for the sake of it?  If so, then you probably have a network of 15,000+ people and you probably don’t even know 20% of them.  What good is a network of faceless people who cannot advice or support you?  What good is following 1000+ people when only 100 people are following you?

Take the time and get to know EVERYONE on your contact list.  Use tools such as Google Reader to keep track of all the blogs you read.  Check your Twitter Following page and see if you have actually struck a conversation with every person you are following; if not, go ahead and @ them to initiate a chat.  I promise you they’ll @ back.  Since we’re on the subject, open up your drawer and send an email to every single business card you have.  I know that we have all once or twice been too lazy to send a follow up email after an event.

Remember, it is about the QUALITY of your connections.