If you’re in marketing or PR you probably spend a lot of time thinking about or doing networking.
In the old days (5 years ago?) mostly networking used to be about going to those shockingly early breakfast meetings. I know that business can flow from these but you won’t catch me out of bed before 7AM unless I’m catching a plane.
Social but not in the real world
Nowadays social networking is where it’s at, and, without doubt, there is a good business to be had from doing it right. We can connect with like-minded people, or those that might need our services, all online. Fair enough.
But (and before I go on I must confess to the odd Twitter binge myself) there do seem to be people who literally live online. Whenever I look at the stream, there they are. Their whole day, updating a profile, tweeting and retweeting—a kind of manic ‘stuck-on-repeat’ replay in case they get forgotten for a millisecond!
‘Old school’ handshakes (not those funny ones)
Now, I met a guy the other day who commanded respect because he did networking the proper, old school way. He was a straight-talking, honest bloke who would help you out if he could. He does a fair job for a fair fee. I’m going to post more about him in a bit, but you get the picture for now.
In the short time I spent with ‘Mr X’ it seemed everywhere we went people knew him and they shook his hand. No, he is not an enforcer or a thug; nothing could be further from the truth. As we popped in and out of shops and businesses, he had a good word for everyone and, guess what, he got a nice little bit of new business along the way, too.
He just had respect from the community because he did the right thing with the people that mattered: his neighbours.
No matter how many followers we have, how many online connections we’ve forged, some of us that will never feel that network, because it’s in the REAL WORLD.
