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Networking Strategies and Theory Vol. 1
It should be no secret that I am using this
blog to catalogue my journey through business and entrepreneurship as well as
being a leader. I have currently tasked
myself with growing my network of connections and contacts to create an environment
conducive of easily reaching people that could help me along the journey.
One problem that I have ran into recently
is the actual implementation of actively networking with others. It is an easy idea to ponder but grows more
difficult the more you think and the less you do. It seems that I have found myself in a rut of
complacency regarding where I am currently at with networking and due to this,
I am experiencing some troubles growing my span of influence. This exists on my personal blog as well as
various social media platforms that I use.
I plan to actively shift this by implementing new strategies that I have
researched and plan on discussing here.
One of my end-game goals is to create an
entrepreneurial network capable of supporting various ideas and ventures that I
may want to pursue either currently or later in life. In order to accomplish this, I need a pretty
broad network of individuals across various fields with various specific and
general interests that mesh with my own.
It goes without questioning that convincing people to network with you is
a difficult task, as once you exhaust personal contacts the efforts grow rather
cold.
The Limited-Platform Approach
In the beginning, I began looking to
network across many different platforms.
I distributed my time evenly across all these platforms, thereby
restricting my success on all of them due to my time constraints. I believe instead of being active on many
platforms I should focus on just a few and integrate them with one another. The downside to this is the potential to miss
the big fish because I failed to cast the line into the water. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that this is an acceptable
risk due to the time constraints of not being able to monitor and manage accounts
myself with consistency. If the neglect
of certain platforms to maintain others results in the missing of a big fish,
then all other things aside, this approach may end up being less risky.
My action in this is to throw away Instagram
and any other platforms that I haven’t currently invested a good deal of time
in developing. I intend to keep what I
would call my big three: Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. I also believe that it is necessary to keep
my Google based platforms, as I am publishing this content on one of Google’s
programs. I believe that the time spent
in developing the Facebook Group associated with this blog is enough to justify
keeping it as well, if for nothing else, to reverberate content that I publish
elsewhere. I will suspend growing across
other platforms for the immediate future and continue to develop these.
Experience with Blogging Circles and Their Exclusion
In the past months I have become a part of
many groups of bloggers promoting their blog.
These are excellent communities to join and they all provide such great
tips and learning experience. My biggest
problem with these now is that they are all other bloggers wanting to publish
content and have it recognized.
Inherently publishing content and operating a website is a very time-consuming
thing. When I run the math in my head,
an active blog manager only has a limited number of hours left in their
day. This led me to the realization that
if you intend to produce substantial results from content, you may have to look
for horizons outside of others looking to attract people to join their purpose.
This poses a challenging problem for an
entrepreneur with a currently limited network with a low capacity to grow due
to time constraints stretched across multiple platforms. I believe the problem lies in direct relevant
engagement and then confirmatory engagement.
Neither of these happen when you are a part of circles or groups
searching for something of their own. I
am now going to actively practice limiting my participation in circles of other
content creates and try to expand my network in the direction of those actually
interested in the subjects that I intend to create a network from.
Defining a Member of My Network
So far before I officially add a contact to
my network, I have declared two requirements.
The first is that I have had a direct relevant engagement with that
person. This would mean that we had an
exchange where the basis was topically related to a subject that I am
interested in including in my professional network. The two key factors are engagement and
topically related. The subject of
interest must be present as well as enough interest from the other party to
engage in discussion. If these criteria
are not present, as I often found, I had a one-sided conversation that resulted
in boredom and frustration. I made it a
habit to try to achieve this relatively quickly or try to forecast whether that
an engagement would be present.
I believe once a direct relevant engagement
has happened, you can tentatively include that person in your professional
network. I believe full inclusion
depends on whether a follow-up engagement happens which proves that they were
not just committing a nicety and were good conversationalists.
Since I have defined these criteria for
building my network, I have found that I have a lot of potential networking
partners to re-evaluate and categorize.
I found that I had thought a lot of people were a part of my
professional network related to my desire to become an entrepreneur, but were friends
appeasing me for conversation. (Which are good to have, and I consider myself
lucky to have them all!)
Conclusion and Key to Success
I believe these and many other strategies
and networking theories are the key to succeeding with delivering entrepreneurial
visions to the world. None of us is as
strong as all of us. In believing this I
truly believe that teams, teamwork, and team building are key to succeeding in
a lot of projects. I believe that especially
for entrepreneurs, the secret sauce here is in the quality of networks of people
that are built and relied on. It is for
this reason that I will continuing publishing content and progress of my personal
networking journey to outline the knowledge that I have gained and demonstrate
to myself and others how I intend to apply it.
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