Recently, I met with a guy who is very good at what he does but his business is slow. I asked him if he did networking. He said “yes, but I never get a darn thing from these networking meetings. Those are a waste of my time.” He showed me a huge stack of business cards. He revealed to me that he has never kept in touch with anyone from the cards.
I asked him if he was on LinkedIn. He said yes. I asked how many people from the cards he has on his friends list. It was a very low number. I didn’t ask about Facebook, but I’m sure it would be a similar answer. I asked how many LinkedIn groups he belonged to. It was under 10. I asked how many of the LinkedIn groups he belonged to he participated in. He said he rarely if ever participated in the groups that he is a member of.
Hmm…… I think I found the problem here. If you participate in engaging your network, they will forget you exist. That I can assure you. I’m certainly not trying to pick on this guy because I do feel that his problem is actually very common among small business owners.
Remember, work the network!