The Art & Science of Personal Networking

And we are live. All right, is this thing on? Yep, looks like it's on. Hey everybody, how's it going? Shelly here. I think there's at least one other person in the room today, so waving at you. Looks like we've got some folks still dropping in. I see the numbers going, going crazy there, so that's cool. We'll give them another, another minute. Why don't you just, uh, say hi? Hey Ronnie, how's it going? Hope you're doing better. So as we let a few more folks join us, why are we here today? Well, we are here to talk about the art and science of personal networking. More importantly, how to build your brand for strategic influence nowadays, given the, well, let's just say immense amount of noise that is out there in the market with so much, so much going on, on in your feeds and in the news and everything. It's kind of hard to like stand out. So how do we do that in a, in a consistent way to generate influence rather than just, uh, you know, popularity, because popularity doesn't bring you any opportunities or deals, does it? So that's what we're going to be talking about. Uh, hopefully we can just go ahead and get started and then folks will join in as they can. I don't want to keep people past the hour as we promised, so we will go ahead and get started. Trying to bring my slides down. Ah, there we go. That does it. And then I can do that. Excellent. All right. So, The Art and Science of Personal Networking: The Tactical Playbook for Strategic Influence. This whole thing started when I was trying to think about ways to stand out and, and build on my reputation and my influence because I had come out of kind of being in the shadow for a while. And that wasn't the only time that had happened. In fact, it happened again just recently, um, when I had, uh, been diagnosed with, with an illness and kind of went back into hiding in my bat cave, if you will. So just recently started coming back out. So this is very timely. I pulled out my old playbook from when I had gone into hiding last time and started using some of those techniques that I had developed before, and some of them were just not working. So I had to adapt even just in a matter of a couple of years. Um, so this is kind of a collection of what, what has continued to work and what I've had to adapt in order to make it work in today's market. And bottom line really is that it all stems from, from a simple fact that is most people are really just not doing themselves any favor with the way that they're networking. And, you know, I'm not here to tell you that you're doing it the wrong way, but I'm here to ask the question: are you networking and building influence the right way, or are you creating noise? Here's the thing: what really matters this day and age is not who you know, because we can collect all kinds of business cards and accept network invitations on LinkedIn and join social networks and go to events and all that and just be a browser, be a, be a watcher on the sidelines. So it really isn't about who you know anymore like it might have been in the past, or at least that's what my parents taught me. It's actually about who knows you. And there's a subtle difference. It might seem like it's semantics. It really isn't. It's a very important difference. And I'm here to illustrate exactly what that difference is and what to do about it. So forget about who you know and focus on who knows you and on creating value for the people who know you. We'll take a dive into some of those steps here. First up, does this seem familiar? You, uh, build your contact list, you collect business cards at all the events you go to, you You put them into your phone or you scan them into your computer, whatever. You go to LinkedIn and you send out invitations and you request connections and you, you know, join groups and all that other stuff. Maybe you make some calls, you send some emails, you know, kiss babies, shake hands, all that. But honestly, how much of that actually works? And that's kind of what I was finding is accepting connections and going to events and making calls and trying to set up meetings. In fact, I wasn't even getting a lot of meetings. It just wasn't working. So I had to change things up a little bit. At least for me, it didn't work. So the value now is really focused in who knows you, which means they remember you, they respect you, or they value you, or hopefully all three of those. And they're interested in what you have to say in your content. Really, the way to measure this is will they answer the phone when you call, or will they call you when you ask for a call? Will they accept the meeting when you ask for a meeting? That's the measure in your network worth and your value. You can't just sell your LinkedIn network. You know, there's no way to do that. If I could, believe me, I would have sold my LinkedIn network a long time ago and I made a bunch of money. You can't just go out there and say, hey, who wants to buy my LinkedIn? And then just hand it over to the next person. So if, if it's so valuable, then why can't I make money off of it? Why can't I sell it? Well, the reason is because the, the place where we go and connect, which is— could be LinkedIn, it could be Facebook, it could be Instagram, it could be WhatsApp, it doesn't matter— the place that we go isn't really as important. Kind of like when you do in-person or IRL networking it really kind of doesn't matter where you go. Sure, it's nice to go to a fancy hotel and get great food and good drinks, but if you were just hanging out in some random backyard barbecue, you would still be able to network. If you were meeting somebody, uh, you know, bumped into in an escalator on an airport— this actually happened to me— somebody recognized me as I was going down the escalator and they were going up, and it was actually not somebody that I know it's someone that a really good friend of mine knew, and they recognized me from my friend having a picture of me on their, um, at home. And they'd seen that picture so many times, they're like, hey, I know you, you're, you, you're friends with Bruce, right? And that's— and like, sure, yeah. So, you know, I stopped at the bottom and waited for him. He came back down, we chatted for a few minutes, and I made a connection. So really, it's about not just being recognized, but being remembered and being someone that people think about when they, uh, have a question, or when someone asks them, who do you know, that you want to be one of those people that they say, oh, I know this person, I know Shelly, I know so-and-so, and I can introduce you. Even if they don't feel like they're your good friend, at least they still, they still want to introduce you. That's what we're trying to drive at here. So let's take some steps towards this tactical networking for authentic value. Um, sure, you can go on LinkedIn and you go on Facebook, but if all you're doing is posting and you're not conversing, then that really loses value quickly. I built a Facebook group about The Talent Sourcing Method, which was, which was my book that I published. And I thought, you know, oh, I've got a book. People are gonna wanna join the network and they're gonna wanna talk about the book. But it just sat there for a year, actually, maybe more than that, maybe about 2 years. And I invited people to join. I, I was begging my friends, hey, can you, you know, go in there and post a comment to try to like breathe some CPR into it? And it just never took off until I started adding value. And how did I do that? Well, I started doing these, little Friday 1 PM meetings between the, the people that were in the group. At the time, this was just on Facebook, and it became Shally's Alley. It basically just started out as a Facebook group chat during COVID during the lockdown, and that grew into let's do video, and that grew into hey, let's broadcast this, and then it grew into let me add some guests because I can't come up with content every week for this. And now it's a pretty well-known podcast, been picked up by Work Defined. But it just started with a bunch of people, Ronnie himself on the chat here, and I basically just doing a chat on Facebook that has since grown. It doesn't mean that you have to go and do something like that, but you do need to create some sort of value. So if you're gonna go on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, on Instagram, whatever, Be intentional about the people that you're going to connect with and then be intentional about creating content. Now, you don't have to actually write blog posts or do research and invest lots of time and energy in creating a piece of content. There's a lot of ways that you can create and engage thoughtfully in these online communities. One of them is commenting on other people's content. but be careful, don't just comment just to comment, like commenting and being like, here, or yes, or, you know, watching, or, you know, following, or whatever, that's not really a comment. By comment, I mean say something about what the post is. Here's a little trick that I learned, and here's my secret sauce, if you will, that's not on the PowerPoint slides. If you don't really have anything in your mind that you want to comment about, but you know that it's an interesting piece, It's an interesting article or video or whatever, and you want to say something about it, but you just can't think of something to say. Here's a trick to help think of something that you could say. Simply grab the main idea or the idea that caught your attention and ask yourself these two questions. Yes, and— so I agree with what they're saying, and I would add that Or yes, but I agree with what they're saying, but I would add this other perspective. Now both of these are positive. One is I agree and I enhance what they're saying, and the other is I agree but I have a different opinion. I see value in that, but I think it could be done a different way. Both of these are basically additive comments to the original content. So adding something to the story you know, a similar anecdote or a similar experience or adding a different point of view, contrast if you will. Both of these are engaging, not just the person who created the content, but everybody else that's commenting on those. That's a value add. You also don't have to write original content. You can create content by what's called curating other people's content. So for example, Maybe you created a good list that you subscribe to of different news sources, maybe through RSS. Or I've seen a handful of people like David Marr on LinkedIn, for example, had tipped to him. He's created this following because he posts an aggregated and curated list of job postings. None of those job postings are his job postings. They're job postings of sourcing and recruiting roles that he shares with his network, and he's built a big following for that because people subscribe to see the updates. Now, can you get a job posting from other places? Yeah, there's a million places you can get job postings from, but the way he packages and presents the material is value-add. He's curating the ones that are remote roles or that are mid-level roles and so on. So instead of you having to go out and figure out how to do that for yourself, he's already done the filtering and and you can bet, you can count on the fact that he's vetted these roles and they're new and fresh. Of course, by the time you read the post, if it's a week later, they're not so new and fresh anymore. But the idea is if you get that post when it's first out, you have first mover's advantage. And there's many other ways to do that. So you don't even have to be an expert in a particular field in the sense that you're like a PhD in that area, just as long as you have something to say about it, even if what you're doing is reviewing someone else's work. Like doing book reviews or gathering articles about a particular topic and summarizing those articles into a new blog post that, you know, basically captures the ideas from all the articles and compares them, or a pro and con list or something like that. These are all ways that you can create original content by using existing content and just adding a little bit of flavor to it, kind of like taking that recipe from the recipe book and adding that, that dash of hot sauce or whatever you want to call it. Um, so when you're at events, here's a couple of tips. And this is, again, recently learned about this at, um, at a couple of events. I just started going back out after my cancer treatment. I just started going back out to events, and I kind of— I felt really out of it. I, I felt like I just didn't really know exactly what was going on, um, because there were so many things that had changed. And so I sort of went in the corner and sat down and just waited. Now, nothing really happened. A couple of people who knew me came by and said hi, but it wasn't until I actually got up and decided to take action that I started getting value out of this event. This was a talent acquisition week in San Diego that I'm talking about. And what I did was I went through the, the registration app thing where you can see who's there. And I did a search for people that I want to meet, and I just highlighted 5 people. Basically looking through the, the directory of attendees, I just highlighted 5 people. And then I walked around to look for those people, see if I could recognize them based on their picture. And if I saw them and they were talking to somebody else, I would later approach that person and ask for an introduction to the person that I wanted to meet. So essentially, I kind of found the people that I wanted to talk to. And if they were alone, I would approach them and say, "Hi, I wanted to meet you." Or if they weren't alone, I would then ask for an introduction later so not to interrupt the conversation. And I actually met 3 out of those 5 people and have, you know, extended conversations with them now. So that's the difference between kind of letting the event happen or actually doing something about it. Single out some people and go out intentionally, just like you do with the booths. If you go visit the booths, go out intentionally to look for that person. They're not going to be frightened, uh, you know, you're going to them during a networking event, so it's not like you're finding them out in the real world somewhere because, you know, you stalked them on their way home or something like that. These are people that are at an event, so if you approach them and say, hey, I saw you in the directory, I noticed that you're with company X, One of them was a vendor that was doing some stuff that I didn't know anything about, and they weren't at their booth because they didn't have a booth. It was just a vendor that was there. So just to give you an example, kind of going out of your way. And the important thing is, when you introduce yourself, you don't just shoot your mouth off about what you do. That's gonna kill it pretty much right then and there. Instead, ask them how you can help them. So I kind of pretended that I knew my way around, even though this was my first TA week in a long time. I was like, hey, you know, I'm new to these events, but I know a lot of folks. Are there any introductions you want me to make for you, or is there anybody I can, you know, tell you about? Or, you know, do you have any questions? And asking them if I could help them was a huge icebreaker, got them talking. Then after the event, I make a note on my— I use Evernote, but you can use OneNote or use a notebook for that matter, or whatever. We'll get back to your desk and send them a brief recap. Hey, it was nice to meet you and talk about XYZ. Here's my contact information. If you can send your contact information while you're there, this happened a couple times with the iPhone tap thing where you can tap the phone and they had my contact info, but I still captured theirs and sent them a message when I got back with a quick recap, my contact information, and that's when I tell them what I do. And it's not a huge conversation. It's just Hey, it was nice to meet you and talk about this. Here's my contact information. If you ever need anything, let me know. And, you know, meanwhile, a little bit about me, uh, you know, I'm looking for companies that need talent acquisition strategy and, you know, etc. And here is a link to my, my, my page, my home page. Basically, that was it. They didn't all respond, but I did add them to my list of people to keep in touch with, and I occasionally send them messages and so on. You'll see here in some of these slides here what I do. So you want to create some content, curate content, comment on content, intentionally join groups that are participating and active, create your own group if you don't like the groups that are out there, and to vitalize the group you have to actually start adding content. Don't expect people to just join because it's got a cool name. And then another thing is just tag people. You can tag or mention or forward posts to people in your network. And just say, hey, I read this and I thought about you, or I wrote this and I thought about you, or I wrote this and I'd love your comments. Ask them to comment, ask them to contribute, send them the blog post, you know, a day in advance and say, hey, I'm gonna post this tomorrow. Do you have anything that you would add? And I'll give you an attribution. I'll, you know, I'll put your name and link to you on the blog post. You've seen me do that a couple of times recently where I've created a blog post and mentioned the person that I, you know, basically kind of consulted with in some cases 2 or 3 people that I consulted with, and I link them right there in the article and they appreciate that. You know what they do? They then forward it to their friends so they can brag about, "Hey, I was in an article. Check this out." Now their friends are commenting it and that starts to build that brand name recognition in a valuable way that isn't just spam, spam, spam, you know, share, share, share, ask, ask, ask. The other thing I'm going to warn you not to do is when you start these relationships, worst thing you possibly do is start by asking them for something. Offer yourself up first. Most of the time they'll say, yeah, great, but, you know, can't think of anything right now. However, you start by asking them for a favor, now you're in their debt. So it's kind of worth to go the other way around and be, um, the one that grants the favor first, even if it's just a small favor. And then if you're going to ask for a favor, ask for a small favor before you start going into the real you know, deep stuff. I know that sounds intuitive, but I see a lot of people connect with me. This happens all the time. I mean, just today I got like 5 of them. They send me a connection request on LinkedIn, I accept it, and immediately within 5 minutes they want to set up a meeting. And they flatter me like, oh, I saw that you're strategic, blah blah blah, I'd love to, I'd love to meet with you and tell you about it. I'm like, why would I want to meet? I just I just accepted your connection request because I read your profile and it looked like we're in the same industry, but I have no idea what you do. I really don't. This, this one person texted me. I'm not kidding. Okay. They texted me. This was yesterday. No, it was not yesterday. It was today, 9:35 AM. Wow. I can't even believe that. I would like to learn about your services for my clients. And I would like you to learn more about what we do and how we can help you in your business. I was just like, but you don't even know who my clients are. You don't even know what I do. It was just so out of place. So it's better to be more like, hey, what do you do? And here's what I do. That, you know, that, that, that just seems to work a little bit better. Okay, I'll get off my high horse here and move on to the next thing. There's probably a lot of hidden networks that you are not aware of right in front of you. They're hidden in plain sight, if you will. For example, your current and your past colleagues. So yeah, I know you work there, but have you really tried to meet other people there? Especially these days when a lot of jobs are remote, you don't really have an opportunity to meet people that are in the same function but other teams and in other functions but at the same company. You can actually use your internal company Slack or Teams to reach out to people who have interesting backgrounds. If you're on Teams and you look up in the directory someone that is, you know, posting articles about artificial intelligence and they're at your company, you can ping them and say, hey, I saw your article on artificial intelligence. I'm very curious about it. Would love to, you know, invite you to coffee or do a virtual coffee or something. Are you open to a quick 15 minutes sometime this week or next week to talk about it? So you're flattering them a little bit genuinely because you like their article, but then you're also inviting them to network with you. And these are people that you work with and you never thought of reaching out. So these are people that are right there in front of you and are colleagues, and the resistance to accepting connection requests is almost eliminated completely. You work at the same company. One of the first things I do when I join a company is I start inviting the people at that company to connect with me on LinkedIn with a very simple intro. Hey, just joined. I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone. Ping me if you need anything. Here's what I do. And I just invite a bunch of people. And if I ever leave that company, which, you know, happens, I still take those connections with me and they'll remember that. And so I still go back and, you know, and reach out to some, some of those folks, not very frequently, but frequently enough to where I'm maintaining that connection. And that's what's important. So basically just look through your internal company directory or past companies. It's okay if you've left. Hey, I used to work with you at um, whatever, Fiserv, and we never had a chance to connect. I see that you've moved on and I've moved on, but you know, it's never too late for former colleagues to reconnect. How can I help you? How can we share connection? How can we share networks? So basically inviting people that you did not already know from your employer, not the ones you already knew, obviously. Another one is seek out and join Niche communities that are related to your expertise, actually find them. Facebook groups is a good example, and LinkedIn groups is also a good example. But they're not just those two. There are online communities that exist outside of— oh my God, social media. They're outside of that. They're their own. I found one the other day that was a discussion group for people in HR analytics. That I didn't even know existed, and it's an online group. You have to create a profile. You can log in with your LinkedIn, but it's not a LinkedIn group. You have to log into their website and, um, you get, you know, updates via your email if you want to, or you can just log in and there's a discussion board and everything, and they have like a Drive with content and things like that. So that's an offline, as in like it's not public, network that you can join and you can Ask questions. People like to help. If you ask questions, they'll give you the answers. Contribute, um, with what you know, and it's okay if you're not an expert. Even if you just ran across an article that's relevant, share the article with them. And you can go into the posts in the past, even going back in time a little bit, and comment and ask questions about things that have already happened. Nothing wrong with that. Alumni networks. If you went to school or could he also be corporate alumni? If you went to any school, it doesn't even matter if it's college or if you graduated or not, could be high school, connect with people that you're, you're shared alumni with, and there's a barrier that is automatically removed because you both went to the same school. People will just accept connections. I do this all the time with RIT, where I went to college, and I'm often connecting with people just because they went to RIT. Hey, that's it. That's the only thing that we have in common. Hey, I noticed you went to RIT. I went there too. Remember McTahoe's garbage plate? And that's it, you have a connection. But these are people who might have influence in other areas that might bring you opportunities. Now, once you make that connection and you join those alumni networks, remember, you have to contribute. You can't just lurk. Nobody's going to invite you to, to come to the discussion. You have to contribute something, but you don't have to necessarily contribute net new content. You contribute in other ways. You can ask questions, you can create polls, et cetera. And don't forget about other channels that are related to your job. Vendors, suppliers. Sure, they're the ones that are trying to sell you. They're calling you, right? You're on their call list. But have you considered maybe once in a while taking one of their calls and just saying, hey, I'd love to help you. I know you're trying to sell your sourcing tool or your staffing solution. Or whatever. I get it. Tell me a little bit about what you do and let me see if I can help you, right? And then when they're done telling you what they want, you can go back and say, great, now here's what I need. Here's what I need. Do you know of any companies that are doing this or any clients that are doing this? Or if you're looking for work, do you know anybody that's hiring? So listen to their sales pitch, but then use that as a channel. They're already doing all the groundwork. They're probably making more calls than you're ever going to make. So why not take advantage of that groundwork, offer something in return, and then you can come back and, um, you know, I don't want to say use them because that sounds terrible, but you can use the network as a launch pad is what I'm trying to say. I'm sure you've heard about the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. There's a bunch of different ways that people interpret this, and, um, the big, the big Pareto by the philosopher, um, Pareto, it was an Italian philosopher that created this, this rule of economic worth, or basically net worth. The observation was that 20% of the population have 80% of the, of the net worth, or, or own 80% of the value of, of whatever, you know, X, whatever the variable is. But this 80/20 rule actually works in a lot of other ways. One of them is in Relationship ROI. So here's the idea. Go through your network and identify the 20% of your network that is doing the most for you in terms of opportunities and invest in that 20% more frequently. Those are the people you mention. Those are the people you introduce to others. Those are the people you invite to your new group or you ask for comment on your blog post. or you ask them for favors, because believe it or not, asking for a favor is just as bonding as giving a favor. In fact, I would say, I would argue that asking someone for a favor will, um, make a tighter bond than when you do a favor for someone else. Believe it or not, that's how I feel anyway. So do that with this 20%. How do you determine the 20%? Well, who are the ones that are most active? Who are the ones that have mentioned you lately? You know, pick, pick 2 out of 10. Basically, that's 20%. If you find 10 people that have mentioned you, pick the top 2 that mentioned you the most and start with that. Same idea applies here. And then the other 80% of the people in your network, less frequent. You don't have to connect with them as much. Connect with them less frequently. It doesn't mean ignore them, but because that other 80% is only producing 20%. Of your outcome. So that's kind of the, you know, the ratio there of the 80/20. 80% of results come from 20% of effort. So spend more time on the 20% that drives value and less time on the 80% that doesn't drive as much value without ignoring it. Even if you just get one strong advocate out of that, one person that drops your name, it could be the right opportunity and away you go. So how do we start breaking through the noise? Because it's pretty noisy out there with a lot of things. And I've noticed on LinkedIn the feed is getting really hard to figure out. I get stuff on my feed that's completely irrelevant. I get repeated postings from the same person that I've multiple times said I don't want to see content like this. And the person that I want to get content from, I don't see it, and I have to go to their page to actually look at their posts because they're not coming through my feed. I don't get it. I don't get how this thing is working, or if they even know but it's getting really hard to be the one that breaks through the noise. So let me give you a couple of ideas for cold outreach and, uh, out— sorry, cold outreach. That's a tongue twister. And warm nurturing, uh, a couple of different ideas here. So, um, for cold outreach, when you're sending a connection request through LinkedIn, It's a good idea when you're asking for a connection to customize that a little bit by highlighting something that could potentially be mutually beneficial rather than just sending a connection request. And by the way, I'm not saying personalize it with their name or whatever. I'm talking about customize the connection request with something that is mutually beneficial for the two of you. This isn't necessarily personalization as much as it is understanding the nature of networking. And if this person, for example, is looking for jobs, you can tell them, hey, as a recruiter, I come across a lot of jobs. Perhaps I can help you with that, you know, and in return, here's what I need, right? So instead of personalizing it and adding content about them, add content about your shared experience. That's kind of the point I'm trying to make is it's not about them, it's not about you, it's about Both. It's about the connection. That is what helps people accept LinkedIn networking requests. And I can tell you what helps people accept, because I have a lot of requests and I reject requests to the tune of 20 to 30 a day, because I just— I'm not getting anything on that, on that request. It's, it's, it's blank, or it's really generic. And it's sure personalized, it's got my name on it. Hey Shelley, I noticed your grand vice president Poobah of whatever It literally is like copy and pasted from my profile. It says nothing that they understand what I do. It's just my name and job title. That's not really what I'm talking about. That is personalization, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about them noticing something that is interesting to me and, you know, sharing that. So that's what I want you to do. Customize it based on that. Also, when you're sending email introductions, Be more thoughtful about referencing something mutual. Again, it's that connection. So, if you're introducing Ronnie to Nikki, for example, "Hey Nikki, Ronnie asked me to introduce him, to introduce himself to you. He saw that you had this thing or whatever posted or that you have this whatever." Especially a lot of people looking for jobs now, if you have a friend that knows somebody that was that is at that organization. Asking for an introduction is great, but giving that person a way to introduce you, a soundbite or a tidbit to introduce you is even better. I can call Ronnie up and say, "Hey Ronnie, introduce me to whoever," and he will do it, no questions asked. Same thing, he can call me up and say, "Hey Shelly, I need you to introduce me to so-and-so." I'll do it, no questions asked. But even better is if he writes that message for me, and says, here's what I think you could send. I'm going to rewrite it, but at least I have an idea of what it is Ronnie wants from this other person. So when I pass it along, I'm passing along that mutual interest. That's how the connection will be a lot more likely to be accepted, because I can still pass it all, all day long. That other person is not necessarily going to accept just because it comes from me. People aren't going to accept your request through me just because it comes from me. My favor hopefully extends a little bit more, but you know, not that much. And another thing you can do is customize your messages using video. It's super easy to do video. You can actually do it with your phone. You can do video voicemail, uh, you can do FaceTime, you can record a quick video and send it as an email. Why? Because it's differentiated. Because people are tired of getting the same old you know, LinkedIn messages, the same old whatever. If you email them or text them a 5-second video that shows that you took a moment to think about them, and that can be really important. Like, you could be reading their LinkedIn profile when you record the video. That's almost a no-brainer. Now, how about some warm nurturing? These are for contacts that you already have. Well, I would do check-ins. and I would share helpful information on those check-ins. So for example, just saw this article, thought about you, checking in, how you doing? Drop me a note. Or just saw this video, or hey, have you seen this? Have you heard of this? Uh, are you going to this event? Uh, I'm going to this event. Are you gonna be there? These are all ideas of ways that you can build, um, nurturing with, with a group of people that you consider that 20%, if you will. This is, remember, your 20%. You're going to be developing more, investing more time in something funny, something interesting. Always share it when you check in. It doesn't matter if the person may not find that particular thing interesting. What matters is that you're thinking about them and you're sharing. And they might write back and go, "Yeah, I saw that," or, "Haha, that's not funny," or whatever. But that's still engagement versus just dropping a note to check in. How's it going? Or even worse, which is what happens to me all the time, I need a favor. I don't hear from them for 5 years, and the next thing I hear is, I need a favor. And that's— and then I don't hear again for another 5 years, and then I get another, hey, I need a favor. You're my friend whenever you— whenever you need me to move your television, but you're not my friend whenever you're, you know, just having a thought or whatever. That doesn't make any sense. So, um, celebrate milestones. You saw that they got a promotion. Now be careful about this. I will warn you though, I don't personally like public accolade. I don't like people saying great job or whatever, or congratulations or happy birthday or all that in public. I don't, I don't hate it. I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not telling you don't do that. I'm just saying personally I much prefer a text message, a voicemail, a video call you know, even a LinkedIn message or just private DM, um, rather than, you know, a public kind of like announcement. So beware that some people have that preference, and if you know that, then, you know, respect that preference. But definitely celebrate. You know, you can always drop a note privately, not publicly, via any one of these, uh, channels. This could be new job, this could be promotion, this could be an article they wrote, etc. And then the last of my 3 ideas for warm nurturing is to actually go out of your way to think about who in your network should know someone else in your network. Not because they asked you. So I'm not saying when Ronnie contacts you and you introduce them to someone else, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, you know who Ronnie should meet? Ronnie should meet this other person, and you're connecting those two for mutual benefit of theirs, not for your benefit but for their benefit. You're connecting two people that you know that don't know each other for the benefit of those two people, not because you need something. And that doesn't take a whole lot, and it doesn't take much volume of that before you start building a reputation as a connector, someone who's a connector. So if you just met someone and you're struggling to figure out ways that you want to say connected, think, is there anybody on my network that I know that I could introduce them to? And then just draft up an intro. Hey Julia, I just met so-and-so at this event and we were talking and it seemed like the two of you would have a lot to talk about in common. I just did this with my— is using Julia because she used to work with me at Fiserv and, um, now she's at an auto parts company. And I met someone else who was at a tire distributor company and I thought, oh They're in similar businesses, but they're different enough that they could probably share ideas without being competitive because, you know, tires versus like engine parts, right? And I made the connection, uh, just thinking about you guys, thought you should know each other. It's that simple. By the way, you know, there's a chat if you want to ask anything. Um, feel free to do that in the chat or in the Q&A section. I haven't seen any questions come in, but feel free to do that. I'm looking over here because my slide changer thing is over there. Sorry about that. Automation tools, uh, obviously this is— let me not so obvious because I don't know if I mentioned that at the beginning, but this webinar is courtesy of, uh, sponsored by, if you will, Jobin.cloud. And that's the reason that we're able to use Crowdcast and all that stuff. Um, and I'm not just— I'm not just a customer, I'm also a member, if that makes sense. So I've actually been using, um, Jobin a lot lately for this specific purpose. And there's a couple of things that I want to share with you. First of all, Jobin Cloud is free. There's a free account So I'm not asking you to buy anything. You can definitely check it out. Um, just literally go to jobin.cloud and create an account under your, your email address, whatever email address. And, um, there's a few features that you can use for free. Now there are some other features that are not free that you have to pay for. For example, the enrichment part where you actually get like contact information, as I'm sure you're well aware, that costs money. That, you know, that's, that's something that they themselves have to acquire. So that's not necessarily going to be free, but there are plenty of other options that are free. And one of those is the LinkedIn automation, and that's very, very good to what I'm talking about now. That's completely free forever. So, you know, if you, if you want to pay for other stuff, you can get more automation, you get you know, extra features, but the actual individual extraction of LinkedIn profiles into your contact management system on LinkedIn, a CRM that's built in, is free. Metrics around that, you know, ranking filters, et cetera. You can also send direct messages or invites up to 15 a day. That's a lot. You actually would be fine if you just sent 5 a day. So you create a plan of people you wanna meet and you can use Jobin to send invitations and messages. So you can invite people you don't already have connections with and send messages to people you do have connections with in an automated way with a thoughtful message that you've crafted. And get this, you can also remove connections. So you can send and resend and remove connections. So what you can do is create a campaign where you send a message to connection requests Wait a couple of days. This is what I do. And actually, I think I can actually show you here. Let me see if I can show you this sequence. What a good idea, I just thought of that. You got to stop presenting and share screen. There we go. Okay, I hope you're seeing this. It looks like you are. Okay, I think you are. Anyway, so these are the sequences here, and, um, I've got— you can see I've got Build Connections and then I've got Catch Up. So I have two campaigns that are running One of them is to catch up with people that I'm already connected with, and the other one is to build connections with new people. And as you can see here, don't be intimidated by all the colors. It's, um, it's pretty self-explanatory once you figure it out. And essentially what it's doing is it's looking for conditions like, are we already connected? If not, then send a connection request. And if it is, if we are connected, then send a message, basically. And after a certain amount of time I withdraw the invitation. So I can send them an invitation request and then wait 14 days, send an email, they wait another 14 days, and then if they haven't responded, I withdraw the invitation, and that way it doesn't count against me. So stuff like that you can automate directly with JobIn. You can also automate, um, email as well. And there is a people finder which is free. You can also use— you can get 15 People Finder credits on, on a free account. So you can start building your network with this and managing your network with this. There actually is also ChatGPT integrated, which is really cool because it generates what are called smart fields. In that sequence that I showed you there, one of the messages actually has a a smart field that is generated from the context of the page of the person that I'm messaging, that I'm inviting, basically. So it basically— it's like a placeholder for ChatGPT. It takes the content from the profile in my account for Jobin, for that person's profile, and then it customizes that message. Um, I can give you an example. I basically call it my, my, um, icebreaker, my low-key icebreaker. And it's just a prompt that says, you are Shelly Stackrill, me, and here's your LinkedIn profile. Pretend that you're sending a direct message to a first-degree LinkedIn connection. They work at— here's their job, here's their title, right? Of warm, friendly, and slightly cheeky icebreaker to catch their attention. Begin with this phrase, which is, you know, the way I incorporate the things that I say, the way I say them. Ask them a question about this, and if possible, mention this information from their summary. And then when I go ahead and generate it, it's a different message for each person, and I can approve it and send it. You don't want to just blast it out to everybody because there will be some times when it's someone you actually know really well and you're asking a question that you already know the answer to, and it kind of looks weird. So you do have to approve it a little bit. But if you're definitely dealing with a bunch of strangers that you never met, you can automate a little bit more of it. It is personalized and you are, um, adding yourself to it. It's not just simply, you know, blank connection requests. I did see a question about short video there that I wanted to answer. Yeah, I'll, I'll share that prompt in just a second. Have I sent short video messages for cold outreach? Yes, but what I'm talking about is just with the phone. So not like production video on the computer, just a quick message, like dropping a voicemail. It basically, it's like dropping a voicemail, but you're dropping a video. And it's just, hey, I've been, this is Shelly. I'm just gonna say Darren. Hey Darren, this is Shelly, been trying to reach you, thought I'd drop you a voicemail. Please give me a call back, and that's it. It's different because it's not an email and it's not a text, it's a video, even though it's being delivered via email or text. Um, no, the, uh, the features don't go against the LinkedIn user agreements. But you know what, I can let the, um, job in people answer that more specifically because although I'm a user, I'm not, I'm not one of the creators, so I don't know exactly. I've been using this for quite a while now. And have not had any issues with LinkedIn. There's definitely, what do they call it, guardrails. That's one of the reasons why you can't send more than X amount of messages. So they're using the LinkedIn limits. LinkedIn doesn't allow you to send more than, I think it's 200 messages or something like that. So Jobin makes sure to abide by those rules. So they're playing by the rules that LinkedIn has set so it doesn't exceed anything that you would normally not exceed on your own anyway. Prompt. Sorry about that. Let me grab that. Here is the prompt. Keep in mind this is my prompt. It's going to sound a little weird if it's coming from you because it's really my voice. But let me see if I can put that into the reply. I don't know if I can reply or not. Ah, here we go. Post this as a question. Yes. Okay, so now that it's a question, then I can put it in the chat, right? Still learning how to use this. Did that work? Ah, here we go. All right. So go to the Q&A and you should be able to, to see that. Comment, paste. There's a formula text, which is the squiggly brackets. That's the field name inside of Job In. If you're not going to use Java, and it would just be that whatever field name is in there. So hopefully that came through. Let me see if I can contact— all right, I asked him about the LinkedIn limits. Um, and I was just reminded that there's an all-in-one template that I can share. I posted in the Q&A. Yeah, I posted in the Q&A. There is an all-in-one that I can share. I think I'm still sharing my video, hopefully. Let's see. Yes, still sharing my video. So that is the— let me get out of here. And go back to sequences and add a sequence. So there's a couple of built-in ones here, all-in-one invite plus email, et cetera. This is one that I created so that I was reminded that there's a template that I can show you. This is the all-in-one sequence that's already built in and it has the branching logic. So you don't have to think about it. Once you do a couple of these, it, it becomes a lot easier to, to do it. I made a lot of mistakes the first few times. You can ask the guys at Jobin. I was up late nights texting them going, ah, it's not working, what's happening? So like I said, don't be intimidated by the amount of stuff. It's just because it's branching logic. So as you can see, what it's doing here is it's finding and tagging. You got your prospects, it tags them so you can find them later. And it checks to see if they're a connection. If they are a connection, then you send them a message because they're a connection. If they're not, then do they have an email? If they have an email, then you email them. If they don't, then is it an open profile? If so, then you can send a free message. If not, then you invite them on LinkedIn. And then if they accept, you send them a message. If they don't accept, after a while you can archive. Now it also has logic here if you have Sales Navigator, for example, but you can easily ignore that or remove that. So that's it. And any one of those points, what it, what it does is it breaks to the left or right. So if there is an email, it goes that way. It doesn't follow the other path. All right, uh, the job in team is going to come in and answer the question about the user agreements. I don't know how to answer that. Let me go back to the slides. And here we go. The flowchart is kind of like a mind map. In fact, that's exactly what it is. Basically, it's a mind map for the logic of how the messaging sequence goes. Um, all right, there's a few other alternatives out there. You can use Hunter.io to get email addresses, you can use Apollo, and so on. But I just wanted to give you something here. Time for a quick poll before we wrap up. And even though there's a slide, I actually have this as a poll in the system. So let me make visible. There we go. Do you see the poll? I think you do. Does it show? The question is, which networking approach has brought you the most value in the last year? If you see on, on the right-hand side there on the chat, it should show up. No, the poll's not showing up. Somebody voted. We had one vote. Okay. I think I can leave that poll active. Oh, 2 votes. There you go. I'm going to leave that active and return to the slides. Hopefully it doesn't overwrite the slides because I still want to keep it open. Ah, it looks like LinkedIn interactions are inching out ahead. Um, all right, so as we enter the, the final stretch here, we have a few more minutes. There are some slides, some content that I wanted to provide around basically creating content because it's something that gives a lot of people anxiety. Not everybody's a good writer, or they don't feel like they're a good writer, and you don't have to become a good writer. But I do want to give you kind of some quick tips on how to create content. Bottom line is you need to be crisp, concise, and compelling. The 3 C's: crisp, concise, and compelling. So how do we do that? Before you create any post, think about what the end is that you have in mind. Why am I doing this? Is this to what? Get— build connections, to get people to register for an event, to get people to email me? What is the objective? What is the outcome before you craft the message and then tailor your message to that outcome? There's no such thing as a universal message that is going to give you everything you need. You have to craft each message or each post or each comment for that design outcome. Um, Audre Lorde is a prominent activist and writer, and one of my favorite quotes of all time that's very, very relevant today is that she said, "There are no new ideas, there are only new ways of making them felt." So basically, it's not about necessarily creating something that's never existed before. That's really hard to do. It's possible, but it's really hard to do, especially consistently. But you can definitely repackage and share versions of ideas and make them felt in new ways. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of inspiration. As for the 3 C's, CRISP. CRISP is about why you exist. What is your promise? So think about what are the attributes that you want people to think about when they think about you? When they think about me, I want them to think strategic sourcing, talent acquisition, top-of-the-funnel automation. And so that's why a lot of my content is very, very directed at that very intentionally. So what do you want people to associate your name with? Is it the innovator, the problem solver, the introducer, the connector, the question answerer, the favor granter, whatever? And that is your positioning and drive every single message, every content towards that as crisply and clearly and consistently as you possibly can. The rule of 5 is the other tip I wanted to share. The rule of 5 is basically this: people remember about 5% of what they see, hear, read, about 5%, and it takes about 5 times for them to remember something. So basically, be frequent, be often, be loud. You don't have to have the best idea. You don't have to have the originalist idea, the newest idea. But if your idea is the one that people see 5 times, they'll remember it. And again, you want that idea to be all about your brand attribution. Be crisp. What do you want people to know about you? They want— you want them to see you as an innovator, then a lot of innovation and a lot of variation on things that other people innovate, right? You want to be seen as the connector, then make lots of introductions, do lots of tagging and mentioning, but be intentional about that design. And then finally, the last but not least, is compelling. So we have the 3 C's. We have crisp, concise, and compelling. And this is the hardest one. My best tip on how to be more compelling is to join a problem and a solution and offer the result. So don't point out the problem by itself. Don't point out the solution by itself. A solution without a problem doesn't create results. A problem without a solution doesn't create results. It might get you attention, but it's not going to get you the results that you want in networking. So you connect the problem to the solution and that's how you get the results. State the problem, state the solution. And as far as what you say, or rather not what you say, but as much as how you say it, because the what you say is the problem and solution. The how you say it is whatever you're writing about in your mind, if you're thinking about me, turn it into we. So how can you take that me writing about me, about what I do, about what I think, How do you turn that into we, what we think, what we should do, what we can do? And then if you want to get really good at it, how do you turn that into you but without saying it, right? So me is all about me. Me is all about the person that's writing. We is about the people that are reading that. You is about that particular reader, and that's really hard to do, but if you think about what you're saying in the we context, it gets easier to put it in the you context. and that is the what's in it for you. People talk about WIFM all the time, but they don't tell you how to get to that WIFM. It's not easy to just go from me to you. You've got to take that transition, me to we to you. A little Venn diagram here that I designed some time ago that I think is pretty handy, and it's the 3 circles of what is it that, that you want to say? What's important to you that you want to talk about? About? What is it that's the most important or most valuable for your business, your networking goal, right? So what do you want to talk about? What does your business need? And then the third is what do they want to talk about, your audience? If you can bring those three into congruence, what you want to say, what your business needs, and what they want to talk about, and find a congruence between those three, that's where you start the conversation. If you start it in any of the other two, even if there are just two or even just one of them, it's not as effective. The most effective conversation starters and networking are when it's something that you care about, they care about, and it's good for your business. Sure, you can write about what they care about, but that's not good for your business necessarily. It may be, um, it may be what they care about and it may be good for your business, but it's not what you care about, so it's going to come come across. So again, the congruence between those three. And with that, um, we are wrapped up at, uh, wow, 2 PM on the money. Look at that. I saw a few other questions that came in, and the, the live broadcast I think is going to end, but I will definitely answer some of those questions. Some of those are also comments here. Um, and thank you for taking a moment to answer the poll. There, it looks like 6 to 1 LinkedIn interactions was like by far the winner there. All right, folks, well, thanks for your time today, and we will see you. This is gonna be a series, by the way, so we're gonna see you in the next one. We'll just continue to build on this series in different topics. I'll see you later.