The Science of Marketing

Last week I received an e-mail from a college friend (call him "CF1"), who I haven’t seen in a decade.  It was a are-you-interested-in-this-opportunity? e-mail that you get from time-to-time (in a good way).  I forwarded the e-mail to another college friend ("CF2"), who I thought might be interested.  His reply was: "how did you get on the distribution list for this?"  What CF2 was actually saying was: "why didn’t I get an e-mail directly?"

The answer is simple:  CF2 does not work his social networking.

We are given tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, whose sole purpose is to help us stay connected.  And they’re free!  So why not use them?

Here are some simple tasks that I perform daily to work my social networking.

1. See whose connecting with whom

Check your networking sites for recent connections between people you are connected with and people you know.  Then reach out and reconnect.

2. Reunite with classmates

Perform a periodic search for high school and college friends and acquaintances (and reconnect).

3. Check Status

New jobs, birthdays, events.  When your contacts report ‘em, reach out.

4. Who viewed my profile? (LinkedIn specific)

If you are a free user, LinkedIn shows  you a few profiles of people who have viewed your LinkedIn page.  If you can figure out who they are, it might be worth saying "hey".

If you put the work in networking, you never know what might happen.

(BTW, I also wrote on promoting your blog on social networking sites last September.)

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.