Acquaintance Spamming - Problem and Solution...
Chip explains why automated LinkedIn connection requests and scripted pitches create hollow relationships that leave people unfulfilled. He proposes building quality connections instead through thoughtful one-to-one conversations and genuine collaboration, measuring progress by how many meaningful relationships you develop rather than how many messages you send.
Chapters
Hey there, this is Chip. I am a coach and entrepreneur, and this is the first of a series of, I have an idea for a series of videos. And as usual, as an entrepreneur, I'm trying multiple things here. So bear with me on trying out a new display. What do you call it? Like a whiteboard type of display thing and the screen capture program. So and listening to some recommendations by people. I'm doing a few things. The name of this video, if you will, is to handle a problem that I see, and we're going to call it Acquaintance Spamming. And the provocative subtitle is The Fast Way to Earn 6 or 7 Figure Income While Becoming a Hungry Ghost. A couple of different things packed into that. I get a lot of requests on social media. I've developed a pretty good following on LinkedIn and a fairly decent following on Facebook. And I get a lot of marketers coming to me promising me they're going to— like, if I just, I don't know, either give them $5,000 or $15,000, or if I just use their system, they're going to promise me 6 or 7-figure income. So that's the provocative nature of that. That's the here and now problem. That I would like to handle with timeless and universal wisdom. So here's the timeless and universal wisdom is I don't like that and I don't think it's a good way to go. So we're going to start by identifying the pattern. And so you can see all my little text here. This gives us the Cliff Notes for this. And I am willing to bet that I can turn this into a PDF and you can click on a link below and get it at some point. As I said, this is my first shot at this particular packaging for a video, but I am over and done with not showing up authentically. And so here we go. Let's drop some knowledge bombs into the interwebs and see what happens. So here's the pattern that I see and the problem I see. And now understand that back in the day I did, I got into using a plugin in LinkedIn, and I was automating based upon, uh, search terms in the person titles. Uh, I could find like all executive coaches and connect with them and stuff like that. So search term searches and then automating connection requests to them allowed me to build up a huge network quickly. So this is the way the pattern goes. You automate lead generation on a search term and What you essentially do is write them a script and say, I'm interested in you. I see that you're an executive coach, and I just would really like to connect with other executive coaches in our profession because that would be great. Right. And so that's the first thing there. And then if you write that script well, you get it like a 50% conversion, or you did when I was doing it. I don't know what it is right now, but I think if it's compelling enough, depending on the niche that you're going for, you can get a 50% conversion on that. When the person converts, then you can go, hey, are you interested in my product or service? Right? That's the way it goes. There's a few problems with that, but the whole— I think the bottleneck right there is, is it yes or no? So already you're going for transactional, right? People don't realize that no doesn't mean never. It means not yet, right? The timing may not be good, especially if you're in the B2B space. A lot of times purchasing cycles and investment cycles are much longer, and so there's much more nurturing of the relationship. But on one-to-one, or what would we call that, customer-to-customer as opposed to business-to-business, which I would argue is the only way to do business, is customer-to-customer, person-to-person. Then you follow up with this yes or no question. And then here's where the real problem starts in my mind. If it's a yes, then you get to buy now. And if it's— or join my— what did I write here? Join my marketing. If yes, then buy now or join my marketing container. Ah, what I meant by this was like join my Facebook group because I'm developing a big Facebook group and we would love to have you in there because you'd be a valuable asset. That sounds awesome, except for the fact that how much, how much can you contribute to how many groups before 24/7 all you're doing is playing social media games? So if no, The typical pattern is, hey, can you refer me to other people? And I'm in my mind when I see that, I'm like, in the immediate sense, I'm like, no, I don't even know you yet. Referrals happen after we've done business together. But the deeper question of this is, and the principle that I write further down is, work through people, not around them. Okay, so Uh, here, here's where the buck has got to stop, and here's where— why I made this video particularly, because now when I have people run through that pattern, I'm just going to refer them to this video. So this is me calming down the noise in my environment, bringing order into the chaos. That's the knowledge bomb of the moment. So the truth that we all know is, uh, quality connections equals happiness, right? This is positive psychology. This is all the stuff that we know quality of life, balancing the art of fulfillment with the science of success, looking at mechanics as science and art as being a more abstract qualitative aspect of life, depth of connections with people, depth of relationships from the get-go, from the very beginning, is what equals happiness. Otherwise, you're just skimming across the top of society, right? So productivity without relationship quality equals unhappiness and hungry ghost. So what do I mean by hungry ghost? Hungry ghost is in— you can Google it, it's in Wikipedia, I think there's a page. A hungry ghost is essentially a person who is leading an unhappy life, or, you know, a person who's got a hollow existence and is trying to figure out how to deal with that, right? So it's Buddhist and earlier Taoist. So this is the timeless and universal principle: don't become a hungry ghost and don't behave like one on social media by just going, great, you're a no, give me somebody else, right? As if I'm gonna spend time helping you develop your business when we don't even know each other. That's not a good approach. I don't like it. Uh, life is about blending these two aspects. That's my, uh, thing here. So we've gotten through the pattern, we've gotten through the truth that we know. We all know that this is to be true. The challenge is to act this way all the time. So me screwing around with new software but making a video is me showing up in this way. Now I have a tool that I can handle every time this happens with me on social media. Boom, I just put them to this video and that handles it, right? The principles at work here, outside of what we're talking about with the hungry ghost, work through people, not around them. And I put this in here: life can be described as a journey of increasing your scope of awareness through gathering perspectives, right? So you're interacting with the environment, you're interacting with other people, and this is the deeper aspect of looking at your connections with people, with everybody you run across in life, and thinking that there's this magic bullet that allows me to go, I need a yes or a no from these people way over here and my ideal clients way over there and stuff like that. A deeper aspect of this is to realize that everybody's sort of a reflection of who you are, what you're evoking, what you're emoting, emotion. Is outward movement, the way you're showing up in the world. And the deeper aspect of this is to do this third principle here, build quality relationships. So agreement, this would be a yes/no, right? Just asking a question and having people go to a yes/no state. Not good. Thoughtful disagreement, what I mean by that is not like as in conflict, but if you have a Venn diagram with 2 circles. Agreement is, does this circle agree with this agreement, or does this one agree with this, meaning you and somebody else. Thoughtful disagreement is you're actually connected, you're actually overlapped, but what's interesting is the part of the circles— if we had a Venn diagram— that isn't overlapping. So if you seek that out, that's thoughtful disagreement. It's the exclusion zone where one person has a different perspective than you do. And then the third aspect of this is black swans. So black swans, this alludes to Chris Voss's book Never Split the Difference. It's a book on negotiation, awesome book, totally recommend it. Read it, live it, it's good stuff. Black swans alludes back to the idea, and he even named his group the Black Swan Group, I believe is the name of it. Correct me if I'm wrong. The black swan was considered to be something that could never be found, and then we found them. And so that's kind of where that came from. So if you take that thoughtful disagreement and you collaborate based upon that, you can find solutions that neither one of you could have conceived of before that conversation. So that's really about going through to the deeper stages of relationship building And I would argue, start there all the time if you can. My current goal is to just fill up my life with nothing but compelling and impactful and meaningful conversations. That leads me to shutting down all the automated crap and then finding really good connections and seeing if a person's willing to open up a conversation and then start really provoking instances where we can get into these black swan solutions. That's awesome. That's a great way to do it, right? So always have a call to action. If you're doing your marketing and promotion well, the call to action, the challenge here, and it's not about buy my stuff, that's not the point. It'd be great if you click on links below and go see my learning platform and all that kind of stuff. But my challenge to you is to play this type of game. The way you can measure and monitor your success on that— start right now, see how many you're playing the old way, see how many you're playing the new way, and see what the ratio is, and then up that ratio, right? That's, that's the way you have progress ever. And so I say strive for a 1-to-1, meaning every connection that you make, you make meaningful, minus the noise of course, because we are on the virtual interwebs with lots of bots and that kind of stuff. So naturally you see fake things, and fake things interact with you. So I'm discounting those. I'm saying human being to human being, that's the important part of it. And the last little knowledge bomb of this— I started with this, this is the pattern, right? Recognizing a pattern. So here's where running into circumstance in life leads to timeless and universal wisdom. The pattern of patterns, I call it. So when you notice something, and I've noticed that whole pattern that I talked about earlier, you notice a thing. So awareness is the first step in a pattern of patterns. Then you notice it again, and you notice it again because you're like, something about that, right? So something about that means now you draw a question mark on it because it might be a coincidence. But it might be a pattern. And so the third time you see that, just call it a pattern. And the decision point now you can make in a very concrete way is it's a pattern. And do you want to remain foolish? Meaning, well, I had some learning there, but I'm not going to integrate it into my sphere of understanding, my increasing scope of awareness. Or do I become wise? In which case you do have to integrate it. You have to figure out how to use it. You might even just decide to create a crazy video like this and start using that and all your connections to generate value and make the world a better place. So that's the goal. That's my shtick on acquaintance spamming. Don't acquaintance spam. And if you like these types of videos, if it turned out well and you're seeing it and it looks good and you can read the text and all that kind of stuff, let me know in some way, shape, or form. There's links, there's all this kind of stuff. I will be using this not just on my YouTube channel but across the social media, so I'm still figuring all that stuff out, but some way, shape, or form. There should probably be a Linktree page in there or something like that. I would love to have a great conversation with you and let me know if you'd like to see more of these. I literally have piles. I have a Rolodex. I'm always writing this kind of stuff out. And so I'm going to start making a lot of these. And if you find them useful, let me know in some way, shape, or form, whichever on the platform, and I will keep making stuff like this. I hope it generates value and I hope that you are helped by it. There you go, knowledge bomb number 1 launched and blown up, I suppose. I hope it helps. Take care and I will see you on the next one.
