By Cindy Kraft, the CFO-Coach
Would you EVER walk into a networking event and proceed to pull out your business cards, hand them to every person you see, and ... without ever saying a word to anyone ... leave?
Probably not. Well, I hope not. However, based upon the number of canned Linked In invitations I receive from people I don’t know (and even some I do), that is exactly what you ARE doing. In case you’ve forgotten (and we seem to have a memory problem in this country) ... it’s NOT ABOUT YOU! And every time you send a canned Linked In invitation to someone, you are saying “I don’t care about you because it’s ALL about me and how many contacts I have in my online Rolodex.” That is not the best way to get a relationship off the ground ... in my humble opinion.
Then we have the Twitter newbies who post 27 new tweets that all scream “me, me, me.” This one came in this morning: “go to my jewelry site, follow me to my jewelry site, cool jewelry site, look at my jewelry site, I make jewelry ... repeat.” Twitter is not about selling your wares. It is about building a far-reaching network of people, very interesting people I might add, with whom you can have conversations and create relationships. That may or may not lead to direct business ... but it can definitely lead to indirect business without you screaming how great you are before the relationship ever gets under way.
Just as face-to-face networking requires etiquette, social networking requires netiquette. It might be a different venue, but the rules are the same. Give to get ... because it’s not all about you!
