Lessons

Lesson Info

Network Building 24/7

You also see from what Elena talked about and what we've talked about today. This is 24/7, right? You're sitting here right now. But someone's probably emailing you. Someone might be getting a referral. Jenn Almond Hütter sent me a damn text asking how today was going. Life gets smaller, right? This is all happening all the time and this is why for all of us and again back to the sort of the positive nature of social media. The positive for all of us who are looking to move and drive our careers, our ambition forward. Leveraging those tools and realizing at any point in any time at in any other day, we need to be found and we can define that. Rather than having someone else define and choose our destiny and our outcome for us. You're like, "Oh God she's giving us a lot, no." Couple of other things 'cause I've mentioned this before. It was actually funny once someone said that's probably the best use I've ever heard of Google+. I still have a Google+ profile, 'cause let's all admit it t...

here's other search engines out there and maybe now in the age of privacy we're trying some of the other ones. Like DuckDuckGo and blah, blah, blah, you know in terms of tracking and all the rest of it. But for majority of the world, what do we use? We use Google. Someone looks you up online what do they do? They do a Google search. Have a Google+ profile. Post your important stuff on your Google+ profile 'cause you can change search results. We'll get some tactical and practical here. We've had all sorts of good inspiration and some other kind of stuff. So networking is everything. It's happening all the time. Let's start using digital and human nature to our advantage. So some things I want you to go and do. Today do it frequently check it out. First of all I want you to google yourself. Yeah use the other search engines as well 'cause just in case different things come up every once in a while it happens. What shows up? Remember human nature we're lazy, unless we're trying to find a restaurant that we went to in some city like 20 years ago and we can't find it. No one goes what, beyond the what? First page second, maybe we go crazy and we go on the second page of a Google search results. You can control what people find. So take a look today at what shows up and say to yourself, "Is this what I want to be found for? "Do I wanna be found to be the teacher or the photographer?" What is showing up? And then say, "Right how can I change this?" "How can I change what people find?" If I flash out my LinkedIn profile, if I put in more keywords. Right, if I don't just have bare bones because LinkedIn will get, it's really high Google Search page ranking. You can do that, right? What do I need to change on a personal website? I want you to think about the bios and the information you give other people. Because you may say, "Well I sit on a not-for-profit board "and I just gave them this bio," Uh-uh-uh. That might be the first thing people find. They may have better search engine optimization than your own website. If you're trying to tell everyone that you are a high-powered executive or you are a photographer or you are a whatever. And what they're reading is a bio that says all you want to do is I don't know, fill in the blank, exactly. Like, hey I'm really looking forward, this is a true example. Someone who was looking for corporate board opportunities. And the first bio I'm finding her online is her greatest achievement is her children. I think it is the greatest achievement, but that's not what a board of directors wants to hear. They wanna see P&L responsibility. They wanna see international experience. So even if you're giving your bio to someone else understand, when I say go back to our visual of what's your network, you're giving your bio, you're giving your information. Thinking, oh it's just the not-for-profit board, or this is not the committee, the association, the community organization but it's everyone else who touches them. So right the bio, present yourself as how you wanna be found. You wanna be found that your greatest achievement is, fill in the blank, or do you want to be found for-- I sure as mean I loved being a lawyer, I don't wanna be found for being a lawyer. You go and look at my profile that's yeah, in years and time it's further down on the bottom. The description is very, very simple because I don't need those keywords showing up. I don't need to be found for that stuff. It's not what I would highlight unless it was interesting and important to the audience that I'm in front of. And in a few weeks I am talking to lawyers and you better believe my legal profile is coming out because they're not gonna listen to me otherwise. Lawyers are interesting that way, let's just put it like that. So I promised you because someone said how they fit more time in. This is another of the worksheets that come with the class. People wonder how they're gonna add in more networking in the day and I go back to networking is everything, what are you doing on a daily basis? And I look at it from the minute I get up in the morning to when the day shuts down I got a lot of hours, that I have a chance to make a human connection. And I can further a relationship. How do I choose to connect and engage with people? What do I doing? Can I send a better email? Can I send a text and ask someone how their day is? Can I suggest we get on FaceTime instead? Can I walk to meet with them? Can I do something else that will, as I said make a stronger relationship and really unless it's probably with some girlfriends and hanging out you know. And that's probably my cup of tea I'm having at home in the morning 'cause that's just the way I am. It's not involving me to add more in my day it's just doing what I'm doing already better. So I filled this out. My sort of what could be 15 hours of typical possibility for me. And think about we could have had Elena you know call in. We could have heard her voice but how much better was that to see her face. So think about some of those activities that you've got. Maybe you working in a co-working space and someone is down the hall and around the corner and you're emailing with them. Put down the, put away the keyboard walk down the hall. Extraordinary partner when I was in law firm management. Extraordinary in the sense that he and I did like you know a 180 on our relationship. Started off one of those hostile, like the emails you're fearful to get 'cause you're just kind of like angry guy in the corporate department was gonna, "Oh great angry guy is again there." No one liked this guy. "Oh my god is he emailing you, oh condolences I'm sorry." Yikes, whatever. So one day I knew he was emailing me and I knew it was coming from his desk 'cause it didn't say this is sent from my blackberry. And I picked up the phone and I called him. And he was shocked 'cause it was 7:30 in the morning, and he's like, "Oh my god what are you doing in the office?" I said, "Well I come in the office at this hour "because between 7:30 and 9:30 when no one else is here "it's the only time I can get any work done uninterrupted. "After this I got people in and out of my office so I..." "Do you always coming at this hour?" "As a matter of fact I do." "Let's go grab a coffee." He and I were buddies after that, why? Because he was angry and frustrated 'cause when he came in at 7:30 in the morning no one else was around. And he felt he was the hard one working. And it made him angry, I was like, "Wohoo no one's here I can get stuff done." But once he understood I was working as hard as he was, he could hear me and we could actually have a conversation. So some of these things, that first of all you're doing anyways I want you to start looking at them as networking. When you repost someone else's information. When you make a review. When you write a recommendation. When you say, "You know what, let's just we're gonna go back and forth angry and frustrated with each other for 15 minutes on email or we can walk up to the cafeteria and grab a coffee that we could equally do around the corner on our own floor. Made a difference in a relationship. Think about how these things you're already doing could be switched and how what they really are is building relationships. And really focus on getting these little micro actions better everyday. Those micro actions are the ones that lead to the great outcomes. Retweets and acknowledgments and some of the gratitude on Twitter you know that's what led to the foreword. Not, "Hey Tom would you write a foreword to my book." You know just throw that out there. So do all of those little things. I also want you to think about, alright what are things I can do every week? A recurring to do I have on my own to do list is random outreach. And I forced myself to stop and think, alright who's someone I haven't talked to in a while. Who's someone I haven't checked in on. I forced myself to do that. I can go to Facebook and see whose birthday it is. I can go to LinkedIn and see who's had a promotion or changed at a new job at work experience and I can congratulate them on that. You know that's the beauty of some of those tools. For those of us from used to remember pen pals and address books and then your pen pal moved and they didn't let you know the address changed. Bye-bye pen pal, they're gone right? We don't have that same problem anymore, thankfully because of social tools. So use them in that human connection. But so think all right, what are some little things I could add in? And by doing so I'm furthering a relationship. And sure as heck doesn't take long to react or comment on Facebook. It's a heck of a lot easier to try and schedule a coffee date or sign up for another cocktail party or you know. You can see I'm already like dragging my feet at the thought of that, right? There's a lot of other things that we can do but there may be times where you say, "You know what I've been lazy on this relationship. "I can change it if I actually take a little bit of time "and do something different with it." Question, yes good. Questions, questions, questions. You had a checkbox for short content. I'm curious how that aligns to, I've often heard the term how Twitter is micro-blogging. Yeah. So help me understand that a little bit better. Yeah, yeah so I think the idea of creating longer ways to express your point of view can be like daunting. Like it can be daunting to say I'm gonna write an article or I'm gonna start blogging. That could feel like I'm gonna say sort of January and New Year's resolutions. Like I'm gonna exercise, I'm gonna start running and I'm gonna run five miles a week. Like you know used to say that January first and by January fourth it's not happening and it's never gonna happen, right? So how can you get-- when I think about networking in your expertise of being found for the type of projects and roles and opportunities you want, you need to share your point of view. So how can you create short content? So Twitter could be you know an idea of sharing your point of view in a very succinct way. Instagram. Aiden Donnelly Riley author. Another of the people who's interviewed in my book, she uses Instagram to micro-blog. And talking about her writing. Talking about her decision not to drink, and sharing that and using that in a much more expressive way not just because you can post a wonderful visual. LinkedIn. You can, there's a nice amount of space there that is not onerous. It's three, four, five sentences and it doesn't need to be creating your own original content that you wanna comment on, it might be a news article. Might be somebody else's story. So then you're promoting somebody else or you're talking about a subject area that you wanna be known for but you don't have to create the eighteen hundred words or the three thousand words whatever. You're commenting something, say it's an article in the Atlantic or the New York Times or you know San Francisco Chronicle or whatever it is, but in that very way of creating a short content you can bring things to your network's attention. You can say to them hey this is valuable. This is a useful article and here's why. Or this is an interesting point of view and I don't agree with it, here's why. You get to highlight and promote yourself in a way that is meaningful and helpful to your network. And it's also achievable because I'm not saying to you, "You should be writing 1,800 word essays." You know, like no, where didn't none of us are gonna do that, right? But this might be the sort of the gateway drug to get you to doing some more of that content sharing. But this is a way of letting your network know what you care about but also bringing things to their attention that they could find valuable and useful.