Keep re-evaluating the effectiveness of your efforts. Your network is not just your pipeline to opportunities. It is now your net to all opportunities. Take time today to build those connections that count.

Getting introduced to others is just the beginning. the process of staying connected, “co-creating” opportunities with others following an initial meeting, is what the best-of-the-best networking is all about. Don’t be afraid that you don’t have anything to offer today. you don’t need to:

• Have an in-depth knowledge of another’s industry
• Have any current leads or referrals to give
• Have to manipulate the conversation to get the other party
• to focus on your needs
• Have to feel as though you are pushy
• Have to offer anything more than appreciation for the other person in the beginning and then be on the look out for opportunities for those with whom you network going forward

Finally, note that, today, the introduction is the new referral. You don’t have to be referred to carry additional influence or klout with a solid introduction. And for my bonus tip, go one more step. Provide a good introduction for those you ask to introduce you.

For example, if I ask someone to introduce me, I send them the following request,  ”I would like you to meet Melissa. Melissa is the author of thirteen books, four that have been on best-seller lists. Her greatest strength is helping thought leaders grow themselves and their organizations through social media and publishing. She and her firm, Networlding, have helped more than 100 top thought leaders grow their platforms through social media marketing, book publishing and, now, speaking.”

Now do the same for yourself. What can I say about you to get others interested in connecting with you? Write me an introduction and you are many steps ahead of the pack.

• Hire bloggers to write amazing search engine optimized posts?
• Get a top social media star like Ashton Kutcher to promote you and your business?
• Write a book (you can easily hire ghostwriters–hint, hint) to help you get one out quickly. It could even be called, “The Million Dollar Social Media Experiment.” Also don’t forget to hold dollars back for pr and social media marketing support.

I could go on and on with ideas. It’s something I really enjoy doing, but I would rather hear from you. How would you spend one million? Would you hire your friends or perhaps hire someone really great at finding social media experts? Would you be savvy enough to hire a great collaborative team–like a dream team or talent team as one of my friends referred to this new world of stars who are on their own but, if put together in the right way, could yield you an All-Star team the Chicago Bulls created a number of years ago?

What cool ideas do you have?

What a lot of people don’t know is how we accomplished that success and what it could mean for you and your business success, but we’ll tell you so you can use the idea.

First, we partnered with The Chicagoland Chamber in Chicago. We were members of the chamber and as such they provided us with the space we needed to host full-day bootcamps where people could go through the seven steps of Networlding. We offered those interested from the chamber and from Fast Company an option: either they could pay $350 for the full-day event and we would include the Networlding book and guidebook or they could buy the book on Amazon and pay just $50.00.

It won’t surprise you that the majority of people bought the book. Over the course of the first year more than 1000 professionals and business owners came through the bootcamps. We also found that people really enjoyed their groups and as a result, a number of people who connected a decade ago are still good friends, colleagues and even business partners.

Now we are back in full swing with Networlding Circles and we’re looking for people to start circles again through one of our certified facilitators or through ambassadors. If you are interested in beoming a Networlding Ambassador click here to contact us.

Want to start getting better business faster today? Start your own Networlding Circle and I will join you by phone for a session!

Here is all you have to do:

1. Purchase the Nano-Second Networlding book by clicking here.
2. Purchase the Networlding Guidebook by clicking here.
3. Set up a group date by contacting us by clicking here and telling me about your goals and I will help you get started.and promote it with you.
4. Use tools like LinkedIn, MeetUp, even Twitter to gather a group.
5. Read the Nano book and then start the Networlding Guidebook with your group.
6. Set up a time to bring me into your group by Skype or phone.
7. Visit with me online where I will share my twenty-plus years of wisdom helping people achieve transformational opportunities through Networlding.
8. Once you go through a group experience have participants start an extended group but continue to reconnect with your starter group to share wisdom and great connections.
9. Finally, email me (melissa@networlding.com) with your success stories. I would love to showcase you and your success!

The Networlding Guidebook is designed as a companion to author Melissa Giovagnoli and Jocelyn Carter Miller’s bestselling book Networlding. While the first book provided an introduction to the overall concepts and practices of Networlding, this guidebook is intended to help you put Networlding into motion in real-time. Filled with checklists, questions and exercises to help you assess where you are in terms of your networks and the goals you hope to achieve through the implementation of Networlding, as well as a month-by-month action plan to roll out the process, The Networlding Guidebook is a fun, practical and easy-to-understand resource that helps you transform relationships from a pipeline to opportunities to a lifeline in our new world of work.

The Nano Networlders Book. It Only Takes a Second to Change Your Life Forever. Do you wish to surround yourself with people of like-minded values but struggle to find them? Are you experiencing a variety of ‘takers’ in your life, and spending all your energies defending yourself or your department or your company? The Nanosecond Networlders show us that there are compelling new solutions to some of the most vexing cross-cultural, career, and organizational business issues we face today. These solutions recognize that every decision is made in a split-second, and that although we often deliberate for months, the moment of commitment is the moment that counts. Making that commitment in a way that is firmly rooted in recognized individual core values is the key. No one can remove those barriers alone. This book shows us how to participate in an ‘exchange’ of ideas, values, and solutions to break through to our true potential-by leveraging the limitless possibilities inherent in every conversation we have.

1. Engage with other active group members who are leaders in your field. By engaging I mean connecting with other thought leaders like yourself who enjoy collaborating and consider interviewing each other. One person’s perspectiveis very different from another and adds additional depth and dimension to your personal brand.
2. Connect with the head of the group. Consider requesting you become one of the group managers. If you are willing to lead a group then you can make your posts “featured” which brings them to the top of the list of posts. Now you have the opportunity to raise your profile and thought leadership.
3. Recommend your favorite groups to others in your field. Become an advocate for the groups you find most effective. Your recommendation will be seen as an added benefit in helping colleagues and those who get to know you through your colleagues as a step up in developing yourself as a leader online.
4. Consider starting your own group. I started my group Networlding on LinkedIn several years ago. Now it is one of the largest groups on LinkedIn. As such it enables me to be a member of a group called “The Super Group” which is just for the leaders of the largest groups. By becoming a member of that group I was able to meet many influential leaders and share lots of best practices for growing vibrant groups. I also connected with the leader of that group, Richard Chaplin, who is now going to be one of our authors in our soon-to-be-released series of books on the best social networking strategies for a wide variety of different professionals and initiatives.
5. Aggregate, synthesize and republish other articles, blogs and tweets that you found beneficial. I say it often but this one simple tip can go a long way. Many people have great ideas. It is the aggregation of these ideas where you showcase them and their authors and then add your unique wisdom as to why they are so important that helps your growing audience learn better and faster. There is room for many experts in this dynamic, growing area called social networking.

So what other strategies have you seen working well? Who do you like to follow? What is missing that no one is currently addressing? Please share your insights or comments.

Open the Door of Opportunity

I have been training people on LinkedIn now for more than six years and I keep hearing the same question,”Now that I am LinkedIn what do I do?” Following is a list of 10 things (this is Part I) you can be doing that are can really make a difference in your results. Currently I get about 40% of my business from LinkedIn. Maybe this will help you? Weigh in on your best strategies and if I use them I will be sure to acknowledge your idea!

1. Join a variety of LinkedIn Groups. Start by joining three to five groups. There are so many great groups on LinkedIn that it would be hard to give you a short list. There are literally thousands of groups. But the best advice I can give here is to join a local group. For instance, we have a LinkedIn Chicago group. Also consider joining alumni groups. Then join a couple of groups that are targeted to your industry. If you have a company and are a thought leader and speak, consider joining a professional speakers group. Joining diverse groups will help you grow your network faster as there won’t be as much cross over in your groups which means you will meet new people rather than experience what is called in the science of networks a “redundant network.”
2. Observe who the leaders are in each group for a couple of weeks and invite these people into your network. It won’t take you long to see you the leaders are in each group. They are actively posting great questions, getting other group members responding with great answers and complimentary comments. These are also people who have the most comments in response to their questions. Now look at these peoples’ profiles. Observe what other groups they are in. Look for patterns. You will see that these top leaders join similar groups. Either join those other groups as LinkedIn allows you to be in 50 groups (don’t worry as you can always remove yourself from a group whenever you choose) or just put the group name on a list you are growing for later when you want to join more groups.
3. Observe the type of entries that contain the most comments. As you start to observe the entries that contain the most comments by the other group members you will start seeing the types of questions that are of top current interest by that community. Of course these questions and the topics they are related to will also be great topics for you to be blogging about and researching and talking wth prospects or networking referral sources about which will help you grow your presence as a thought leader in your market.
4. Start creating a list of great questions that relate to your business. The questions that receive the most comments should have you thinking about other great questions that could be of value. For example you might ask what is the best advice you were ever given about social networking. An add-on question could be something like what is the worst advice you were ever given and why?
5. Post your questions and in your post share that you will provide additional insights you get from other replies you get. People love to get an aggregation of good ideas from a wide variety of people–the wisdom of crowds at work. Take the type to harvest your answers and then store them in a word document or somewhere like a private Google site (I love these sites and they are free!) where you can get copy and paste them later onto your blog when you have a significant number.

What other strategies have you seen working well?  What is missing that no one is currently addressing? Please share your insights or comments.

They will affect how individuals, communities, and companies organize themselves, where companies and communities stop and start, how individuals balance their different identities as consumers, employees, shareholders, and citizens, how people define themselves politically, and what role government plays in managing all of this flux.”

Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

It was just a couple of years ago when I went to networking events that people would walk up to me and say, “I hear your name everywhere. But what surprises me is that I hear it from different people I know–people who I know, don’t know one another. What are the chances of that happening?” Today that statement would probably not come out many peoples’ mouths do to the rapid learning we have had around social networking. Now we know that six degrees of separation have now, when done right, turned into, rather, “Two Degrees of Connection.”

So what are some things around branding that if you leverage you can make useful for you and your organization? Here are just three to start with:

1. You are now more the brand than your employer–if you choose to be. Today employees, whether they realize it or not, are their companies brands even if they are no longer employees. Why? Well, if you are one of the millions who have a profile on LinkedIn your name can pull up along with your company’s name as readily as any article on your company–even if you are no longer employeed by your company. Remember that LinkedIn asks you in your profile to list past employers. Now that listing is part of Google or any other search engine search and stays there, for the most part, forever. 
    
2. With the combination of “Brand You” and company brand organizations can grow brand equity and loyalty exponentially. I was recently working with one of the top construction companies in Chicago. I was hosting a social media workshop and shared that if they rallied their fifty current employees and had them focus on the good things they were doing in the community already, potential clients would see that the organization was dedicated to making a difference and would stand out from their competitors. It gave their employees a focus for their social activities–one that would also grow each employee’s career as they got recognition for their good work.
    
3. Brand is now becoming a much bigger topic that companies and individuals MUST pay attention to daily. Two weeks ago I was at a talk for senior vice presidents of leadership at companies like UPS, Home Depot and Marriott. These were HR executives wondering about how to effectively build internal networks within their organizations. My team and I had done about six months of research on the growing interest but slow moving implementation compared to marketing departments, HR departments had around social networking. What our research showed was that there is a strong need for organizations to realize the convergence of marketing and HR. Why?What is happening is that companies are attracting or repelling new hires based on their social capital score if you will. Why would new hires want to work at a company that they can easily see has hundreds of communication bottlenecks and walls? All an employee has to do now is listen to one of the grapevines on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. and know which companies have more open networks. Also, you can easily look on any of the company pages on LinkedIn and compare a company with any of their competitors. You can tell a lot from the levels of individuals who have many connections on LinkedIn which organizations have the better networkers. Why wouldn’t you want to be at those organizations? Wouldn’t you want to go to a live networking event  where is higher level management present? Now you can tell which companies have the best networks and join those organizations. So, now, with the science of networks as I call it staring us straight in the face, playing out every day inside and outside of companies–it is very self evident that companies need to take a look at their branding and realize just as the saying used often was, “Everyone in an organization is a sales person.” Now it will be, “Everyone in an organization is active in branding.” The best thing organizations large and small can do is to realize that you must involve not just the marketing department but sales, human resources, IT, accounting and so on and so on.  

Do you have something more to add?  What other questions to you have? 

But what made this exchange more meaningful was that John moved from a potential vendor to my company to a partnership. The brand of BookSurge grew more relevant and more personable especially when John sent me a LinkedIn invitation. Smart move, John.

Now the personless face of a company suddenly was “personalized” into a living brand with traits that are more human like compassion, creativity and lots of care. So just like SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market.,  that is on my favorite company list because they “got personal,” the employees at BookSurge are empowered to be more connective, and just like Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled,” when it comes to branding . . . that. . . . that has made al the difference.

p.s. And John even has his one blog. Check it out. It’s good.

There is no question that selling today bears no resemblance to selling a year ago. At the same time there has been one area in business that has realized a decided growth–the development of social networking. Social networking most simply defined as online networking has grown and will certainly continue to grow perhaps even more so during these fearful times. So what can you be doing as a business owner to capitalize on these low-cost, no-cost marketing and sales tools that are like super express trains helping accelerate top line sales success? Following are three key strategies you can implement immediately to capitalize on a real “Network Effect” for your sales initiatives.

First, choose just one social networking platform to master. Why? Over the last twenty years I have worked with some of the best companies–Motorola, CNA, American Express, Hewitt, UBS and so on with leaders who were constantly searching for the best and most successful tools to grow their markets.  When they asked me to offer my suggestions, the successful results I have seen kept leading me back to social networks and social networking strategies, but more specifically, the strategy I have found even more successful is to master just one platform rather than try to learn and then leverage mutiliple platforms.

My number one prediction since its inception has been that LinkedIn would become a leader in social networks for business.  Now with more than 35 million users, the average age being 41, with all Fortune 500 companies represented with literally hundreds of employees going up to the C-Level, LinkedIn is a platform that can help cut sales cycles by 30% or more. For the last six years my organization has used LinkedIn to help more than 3000 professionals use  how to use LinkedIn to grow their sales and recruit top talent.

Second, because networking at its core is based on building trust, I have seen that social networking strategies can help with not only generate new leads, prospects and customers but also upsell new account opportunities. The real question to ask when growing your network today would be, “Who are the super connectors who my company’s sales professionals can build trust with to create continuous introductions into new and existing accounts?”

With the many leaders I have met over the last two decades it was not until the development of online social networking sites that any of us discovered there would be millions of people who have top-level networking skills and be  “ready, willing and able” to make introductions to key decision makers, or at the very least, are people who are Two Degrees or just one person away from the key decision makers at almost any company. Semi-conductor companies, insurance , high tech–you name it, all industries have top-level networkers who are accessible. Why are these people so willing to help others? They see the networking as “opportunity expansive” instead of “opportunity limiting.” Another name for these people is “Open Networker.” ,The good news is that anyone can build a base of connections to these professionals who will make valuable introductions. And now an introduction has become the new referral. And the cost? Nothing. And the time? Well if a cold call would be considered a Six-Degree Connection what would be the time savings to realize, instead, a Two-Degree Connection?

Third , perhaps the most interesting reality is that social networks are just hitting their stride. As business professionals move from becoming aware of social networks for top line sales to a recognition that they are relevant to building trust faster to acquiring and taking ownership of new accounts to leveraging even more new sales as your customers begin to see you as a leader in your market and then choose to leverage your brand out to even more new potential customers, you will be well on your way to realizing your top line sales vision through your relationships.

Social Networks are here to stay. The only real question is will you be one of the early adopters who leverages their usefulness or will you be one of the Laggards (a company who progresses slowly and falls behind the others)? It’s really as simple as that.

Top Learning Point: Know the Four Stages of Branding to Take Optimum Advantage of Top Line Sales

1. Brand Awareness – Your market needs to first be aware you are out there before they can begin to recogize that you have something that might be of value to their business.
2. Brand Recognition – Once your market is aware you are out there they need to recognize that you offer products and services can help their business become more successful.
3. Brand Ownership - Once your market recognizes your value they are willing to engage you as a vendor partner. Youare first, more of a vendor than a partner perhaps, but, if you know how to continuously listen to your customers’ needs and respond sometimes even create new products and services to serve them, you will quickly turn into a partner.
4. Brand Leverage - And when your customers become real partners with you, you will then find even more opportunities such as co-creating with them through joint ventures and, most certainly, realizing the very real benefit of them naturally spreading word-of-mouth endorsements for you fine work. In other words you will realize the best top line sales opportunities.

The most interests were:

• 94%–say they have made a luxury purchase online in the last six months. Further 56% of the millionaires prefer to shop at a retailers website. It is interesting to see the stores then still spending so much to create a great in-store experience. Millionaires are also more likely to use department store Web sites and luxury brand Web sites than affluents.
• Just over 90% of millionaires say they always or often read other customers’ reviews online, for example, compared with 68% of affluent shoppers. And online advertising had an impact on 93% of millionaires’ clothing purchases, compared to 62% of the affluents.

The bottomline here is that the important thing to know is where your customers are shopping. With the growing economic decline price will be the most important consideration. Keep this in mind as you decide on your marketing strategies.

For more information visit Marketing Daily.