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Hey, everyone! Welcome to So Totally Business Savvy.
My name is Dean Soto and if you can’t tell already, this podcast is a little bit different I am recording this with my Edirol R-09HR that I got from the Podcast Answer Man, Cliff Ravenscraft. Aside from the main topic of this post, the reason why I am recording this in this fashion is because I was at an OC Tweetup put on by Ted Nguyen over here in beautiful Orange County, California, and the topic of hand-held recorders came up. It was brought up by Neal Schaffer from Windmill Networking; he was interested in actually starting to podcast (and if he can’t hear, he should be able to hear everything around me even that loud truck) and he was just asking about what he should use for either recording via hand-held or recording in the traditional manner with a dynamic microphone or condenser microphone or whatever. And I suggested that he get an Edirol R-09HR.
This is my first actual handheld podcast but I have tested this out before and I love the way my Edirol sounds. It’s just fantastic and I’m giving him a little bit of a taste of what it sounds like.
So, anyway, what is the topic for today? The topic for today is networking. Not like IT networking or anything like that but business networking. What is net working? Why do you need to do it? Some tips on networking and some things not to do when it comes to getting out there and building relationships and so on.
So, networking in general which most people do in some fashion or another but really don’t… a lot of people don’t see the importance of it but really, networking is building relationships of people that will, look out for you or refer you to other people, and people that you can call on to just help you in some way, shape or form. So, in other words, they’re basically friends. Obviously, the deeper the relationship, the more likely it is that something else will come out of it. I’m not saying that that’s the main reason but we’ll get into that.
So, why do you want to network? Well, first and foremost, the reason why you want to network is your business will fail without networking. If no one knows who you are, if no one’s talking to you, no matter how many ads you put out, no matter how hard you market through traditional means, you will fail. And that’s just the way it is. Networking, building relationships, building community around you that creates gravity is the greatest driver towards your business that you can build. Reason being is, referrals from your relationships are just totally trustworthy.
If Neal Schaffer refers me to someone, because of the credibility he has (and it linked to this and linked his website on my blog), if he says, “I know a guy that’s very good with technology and business consulting and so on,” the trust that he has already built with his clients or friends and other relationships, all barriers to buying from you are knocked down, gone. There are no barriers because if Neal trusts this guy, then, yeah, I can trust this guy as well. So, by having people vouch for you, you have such a greater chance of getting into relationships, business relationships with other business on your site might not know you.
The other reason is you have people continually talking about you. It’s such a great form of advertising. If someone is, say someone is giving a talk about social media or someone’s talking about technology or something and you happen to be a social media consultant or technology consultant and the person actually giving that talk mentions you (sorry I’m a bit distracted by cars). If that person mentions you, that’s huge! I mean, that’s absolutely huge. Say he’s talking to 30 people, that’s 30 people who had no idea who you were before, who will then later on, talk about you as well to people who they know or they might do business with you, one of the two. That’s such a powerful form of advertising. It can be 500 people that that person is talking to. You never know. But that’s why it’s so important, that’s why networking is so important because it gets gravity around you.
Do you really want to be hunting leads all the time or wasting money on advertising? When all you can be doing is talking to someone or being a good friend to someone? Personally, my business has taken off dramatically when I started meeting with people and getting out there.
One great thing about networking is you get to see whether your business idea, which you thought was so wonderful, will succeed or not because ultimately, when you first meet someone and they ask, “Oh, so what do you do?”
And you say, “I do business in technology consulting.”
“Oh, wow, what’s that?”
And you explain to them what it really is and they look at you kind of like, “Ah, that doesn’t make sense,”
Or “I really wouldn’t want something like that.”
That’s a huge bit of customer research right there, so you know right away whether you are wasting your time or not, or if you need to change things or not.
But that’s what happened with me. When I first started, I didn’t know exactly what I was and people could tell. And as I started seeing what people didn’t like and what people did like, I end up being a business and technology consultant. Being able to narrow your niche down to something very, very simple that you can easily explain to people is absolutely huge. (You get to experience all the loud trucks and cars near my house. Fantastic).
So, some tips on networking. I have to get this to anyone and I disagree with a lot of people on this is that I network for business; but really, my primary goal is to meet great people; people that I want to emulate, either businesswise, spiritually or emulate the way that they handle their time, their productivity, or emulate just anything in general, maybe family and so on. That’s, honestly, the real reason I go networking and that’s the way it should be because nobody wants to be sold to.
I recently went to a social media. The thing over here down by the Orange County Register and people that were giving speeches, there were a couple of them who said, “Basically, you’re in it for the business, you’re in it; you got to treat it like a business” which yeah, you do in a sense, but ultimately, if you have business as your priority, people will know. People will know and they won’t want to talk to you or not. Even if they do, they won’t want to go that deep. The people that I talk to right now like Neal Schaffer and Paul Tran and Ted Nguyen and all these other people whom I’ve met through social media, through meeting them both online and offline, these people are becoming good friends with me and that’s what I’d hoped because I want to be good friends with them as well, first and foremost. If they will do business with me, if they don’t refer me to anyone, guess what? I could care less, I could care less because just the fact that I have met fantastic people…I would hope that I would get referred, but that’s not the point. These are people that I looked up to in some fashion or another.
Same thing with Matthew Warner. I interviewed him on my Productive Catholic podcast, Jean-Remy Duboc, and even Mike St. Pierre, I interviewed him as well. These are people who I don’t expect at all to do any business with because it’s more on the spiritual realm but to know them and to have a relationship with them is huge. It’s absolutely huge! So that was tip number one, primary tip. Do not put the business first. Be authentic, go for relationships.
So tip number two. Use social media but don’t rely on it. Social media has exploded but people tend to stay in social media and basically what I’m saying is they tend to stay behind the keyboard because it’s so easy to talk when you’re not face to face with someone because that’s where people can tell if you’re authentic or that’s where people can tell if you know what you’re talking about or not, you don’t have time to delete a sentence and go back and so on. If you really want to make business relationships, if you really want to make just relationships in general that are strong and where people will talk about you, you have to meet the people that you meet online offline and vice versa. Anyone that you meet offline, you want to bring them into the online sphere and that’s something I did really agree with them at the Social Media Day because here’s why.
So, the people that you meet online, right off the bat, they’re very pleasant, they are happy that you’re following them, talking to them and so on, but you’re really not going to have a deep relationship, they’re not going to take you seriously, they’re going to kind of like, how would you say it, they’re going to feel kind of suspicious. I mean, I know I do. The kind of suspicious as to kind of “Why are you talking to me?” Not that it’s a bad thing but that’s just the way it is. But as soon as you meet offline, the barriers go down. They see your face, they know your persona, they know how you are, they know you fully.
Social media is only a means of introduction and when I talk about social media, it’s predominantly Twitter. Twitter is a great cocktail party; Twitter is a great way to meet new people because that’s just the culture there. If you go to Plurk, Plurk is very clique-ish. If you go to Facebook, it’s extremely clique-ish because you know, those are your friends that you have on there. But Twitter is wide open, totally wide open.
So, when you meet these people online, try to meet them offline. So direct your searches on Search.twitter.com within a radius of yourself. Say, for me, I search for people in Orange County, or I use Hootsuite. I love Hootsuite by the way. I use Hootsuite but the way that I have it set up is I have one stream, one column that has a stream of everything. Another with Mentions to me on Twitter (if you don’t know what Mentions are, @Replies, then you have a lot to learn). And direct messages on one. And then on the other, I have like OC events. I have OC events and things that are happening, people that are talking about Orange County. In that way, I can start following these people, plus I stay up to date with all the OC events that are happening that I might want to go to and help to build my networking, build my community and so on, because right now, I don’t need to go out any further than that and you will be surprised how many people here in OC will talk about you in other areas as well. So, be specific, be targeted towards location.
The other thing is…what’s my train of thought? Oh yeah, so, offline to online. Now, why would you want to do that? Reason being, if you use something like a Contact Relationship Manager like Gist, if you have this offline contacts go online, you’re constantly updated with what they’re doing. And so you’ve already met them, they know who you are, they have built some kind of relationship with you, this allows you to stay up to date with everything that they’re doing – so, if they have a birthday or if they are doing a new business deal and so on. That is something that you would want to know. It’s a great way, rather than having to call them up all the time, just @reply them or to let them know, “Hey, great job on your recent proposal, so glad to hear it,” and it keeps you in their mind. Keep on trying to refresh you being in their mind through whatever other means, easily, boom, boom! 140 characters can’t go wrong.
All right, last point. Social media in itself is… It’s very easy to find people who are meeting up but you got to determine what is going to be valuable and what is not going to be valuable. So say, you have a restaurant. If you are going to search for something, you probably wouldn’t want to see and go to an event where they’re just talking about different types of dogs or something like that. You have to be targeted, you have to be targeted in what events that you’re going to go to. You know, if you do own a restaurant, you probably want to go to all the different types of foodie events, you want to go to obviously, anything that has to do with food. But another thing that you could do is, if there are events that aren’t in the food area, everyone needs food, you might want to sponsor the event; bring some of your food and build an awesome community around the fact that, “Hey, I really want to sponsor these Tweetups in this specific area or this specific area industry. Let me sponsor these Tweetups” and maybe get some kind of promotion, a cross-promotion or something like that.
There’s an idea right there. But be targeted. Be absolutely targeted in how you search for different events, how you search for different types of Meetups and Tweetups and so on. But networking in general (just to kind of close off, as I walk back home), networking in general—man! Had I not realized how important it was? Man, I would be much better off right now than… I am not saying that I am not doing well, I definitely am, but I would have been kicking butt much sooner than I am now.
Just to give you an idea how successful it is. Just in this week alone, I’ve had about three different proposals from big, different organizations to help them with their business in one way or another, some Web development and some of this are kind of business oriented, but yeah, pretty dang cool!
So, your questions, feedback and so on, please don’t hesitate to leave me a voicemail on the 24/7 voicemail line and that is, 714-643-5301. That’s 24/7, you won’t wake me up. Leave me a comment if you have an idea about networking, if you have an idea of how to maybe do it a little bit better, or you completely disagree with me as far as the whole business/relationship type thing, please let me know. Or if you agree with me, that’s that’s not bad either. 714-643-5301 or you could email me at dean@youcanworkless.com.
All right my friends, I hope you have a great rest of your week. I’m going to head back inside, it’s kind of getting dark. Keep it up! Keep doing the business and I will see you at the next episode. Have a great one!
