The true art of memory is the art of attention. - Samuel Johnson

These days we’re overwhelmed with information. So when you’re trying to create a new relationship, what does it take to break through the white noise of information overload?

Becoming front and center in someone’s mental Rolodex is contingent on one invaluable little concept: repetition. Here are four rules of thumb to engage your personal VIPs and then keep them interested.

1. People you’re contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication—by, say, an e-mail, a phone call, and a face-to-face encounter—before there is substantive recognition.
2. Once you have gained some early recognition, you need to nurture a developing relationship with a phone call or e-mail at least once a month.
3. If you want to transform a contact into a friend, you need a minimum of two face-to-face meetings out of the office.
4. Maintaining a secondary relationship requires two to three pings a year.

Using the above rules should give you an idea of what it’ll take to keep your own network humming. I make dozens of phone calls a day. Most of them are simply quick hellos that I leave on a friend’s voice mail. I also send e-mail constantly. When it comes to relationship maintenance, I'm on my game 24/7, 365 days a year.

There’s no doubt you have to bring a certain vigor to this part of the system. But hey, this is just my way of doing things. You’ll figure out your own way. The governing principle here is repetition; get organized and find a way to ensure that you’ll contact people regularly without putting too much strain on your schedule.

Planes, trains and automobiles work for me, but that’s because I travel constantly. What’s your best time for dedicated pinging?

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“The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling.” - Lucretius

Do you want to stand out from the crowd? Then follow up.

The fact is, most people don’t follow up very well, if at all. Good follow-up alone elevates you above 95 percent of your peers. The follow-up is the hammer and nails of your networking tool kit. In fact, FOLLOW-UP IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN ANY FIELD.

Making sure a new acquaintance retains your name (and the favorable impression you’ve created) is a process you should set in motion right after you’ve met someone.

Why go to all the trouble of meeting new people if you’re not going to work on making them a part of your life? Give yourself between twelve and twenty-four hours after you meet someone to follow up. If you meet somebody on a plane, send them an e-mail later that day. If you meet somebody over cocktails, send them an e-mail the next morning.

Some tips for flawless follow-up:

1. Put the name and e-mail address of a new acquaintance in your database and program your calendar to remind you in a month’s time to drop the person another e-mail, just to keep in touch.
2. Remember—and this is critical—your follow up shouldn’t remind them of what they can do for you. It’s about what you might be able to do for them. It’s about giving them a reason to want to follow up.
3. Always express your gratitude.
4. Be sure to include an item of interest from your meeting or conversation—a joke or a shared moment of humor.
5. Reaffirm whatever commitments you both made—going both ways.
6. Be brief and to the point.
7. Always address the thank-you note to the person by name.
8. Use e-mail and snail mail. The combination adds a personalized touch.
9. Timeliness is key. Send them as soon as possible after the meeting or interview.
10. Many people wait until the holidays to say thank you or reach out. Why wait? Your follow-ups will be timelier, more appropriate, and certainly better remembered.
11. Don’t forget to follow up with those who have acted as the go between for you and someone else. Let the original referrer know how the conversation went, and express your appreciation for their help.

Make follow-up a habit. Make it automatic. When you do, the days of struggling to remember people’s names—and of other people struggling to remember yours—will be a thing of the past.

UPDATE: Jason Alba over at JibberJobber posted a video on how to use the JJ to carry about my follow up strategy! Check it out. I encourage people from Networking Hippo and the other sites mentioned to do the same.

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The most efficient way to enlarge and tap the full potential of your circle of friends is, quite simply, to connect your circle with someone else’s. Politicians, the inveterate masters of networking, have exchanged their networks in this fashion for years. They have what are called “host committees,” groups of people hailing from different social worlds who are loyal to a specific politician and charged with introducing their candidate to their respective circle of friends. To my mind, it offers a great template for people looking to expand their own network.

Are there worlds you want more access to? If so, see if you can find a central figure within that world to act as your own one-person host committee. In a business context, say you plan on selling a new product that your company is introducing several months down the line, and most of your customers will be lawyers. Go to your personal lawyer, tell him about the product, and ask him or her if they’d be willing to come to a dinner with a few of their lawyer friends that you’d like to host. Tell them that not only will they get an early look at this fabulous new product, but they’ll have an opportunity to meet your friends, who could become potential clients. They’ll become responsible for holding events that will usher you into their group of friends. You’ll become responsible for doing the same for them.

This kind of partnering works wonderfully. But the underlying dynamic at work has to be mutual benefit. It should be a win-win for all involved.

If you are sharing someone else’s circle of friends, be sure that you adequately acknowledge the person who ushered you into this new world, and do so in all the subsequent connections that they helped foster. Never forget the person who brought you to the dance. Trust is integral to an exchange of networks that demands treating the other person’s contacts with the utmost respect.

As your community grows, partnering becomes more of a necessity. It becomes a matter of efficiency. One contact holds the key to maintaining all the other relationships in his or her network. He or she is the gatekeeper to a whole new world. You can meet dozens, even hundreds of other people through your relationship with one other key connector.

Two quick rules of thumb for network sharing:

1. You and the person you are sharing contacts with must be equal partners that give as much as they get.

2. You must be able to trust your partners because, after all, you’re vouching for them and their behavior with your network is a reflection on you.

A word of caution—never give any one person complete access to your entire list of contacts. This is not a free-for-all. You should be aware of who in your network is interested in being contacted and how. Exchanging contacts should take place around specific events, functions, or causes. Consider carefully how your partner wants to use your network and how you expect to use his. In this way, you’ll be more helpful to the other person, which is the kind of genuine reciprocity that makes partnering, and the world, work.

Image from amber online.

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Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.  - Carl Sandburg

Have you recently found yourself holding on for dear life at the cash bar of some catch-all networking event? As you may have already realized, you’re wasting your time. Forget these awkward networking evenings that often wind up being de facto pink slip parties.

Remember, you create your reality with every choice you make about how to spend your next hour. Spend too much time at desperate, shallow meet and greets, and even the most positive, genuine connector can start to feel desperate and shallow. So why not spend your networking time doing things you love instead?

New plan: Make a list of the things you’re most passionate about, then use that list as a guide to deciding which activities and events you should be seeking out. Use favorite activities to engage new and old contacts. If you love baseball, for example, take potential and current clients to a ballgame. It doesn’t matter what you do, only that it’s something you love doing.

Your passions and the events you build around them will create deeper levels of intimacy. Pay attention to matching the event to the particular relationship you’re trying to build. I’ve got an informal list of activities I use to keep in touch with my business and personal friends. Here are some things I like to do:

1. Fifteen minutes and a cup of coffee. It’s quick, it’s out of the office, and it’s a great way to meet someone new.

2. Conferences. If I’m attending a conference in, say, Seattle, I’ll pull out a list of people in the area I know or would like to know better and see if they might like to drop in for a particularly interesting keynote speech or dinner.

3. Invite someone to share a workout or a hobby (golf, chess, stamp collecting, a book club, etc.).

4. A quick early breakfast, lunch, drinks after work, or a long, slow dinner together. There’s nothing like food to break the ice.

5. Invite someone to a special event. For me, a special event such as the theater, a book-signing party, or a concert is made even more special if I bring along a few people who I think might particularly enjoy the occasion.

6. Entertaining at home. I view dinner parties at home as sacred. I like to make these events as intimate as possible. To ensure they stay that way, I generally will invite only one or two people I don’t know that well. By dinner’s end, I want those people leaving my home feeling as if they’ve made a whole new set of friends, and that’s hard to do if it’s a dinner filled with strangers.

And while we're on the subject of networking, who out there has tried out Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist, the social network for career-minded Gen-Y'rs and the people who want to hire them? Check it out!

7 comments // In Relationship Development Skills

Friendship makes prosperity brighter. - Cicero

Real power comes from being indispensable. Indispensability comes from being a switchboard, parceling out as much information, contacts, and goodwill to as many people—in as many different worlds—as possible.

Engaging in this constant and open exchange of favors and intelligence is what I call social arbitrage. Think of well-executed social arbitrage as a sort of career karma. How much you give to the people you come into contact with determines how much you’ll receive in return. In other words, if you want to make friends and get things done, you have to put yourself out to do things for other people—things that require time, energy, and consideration.

Here’s a few rules to become a master:

1. Think of social arbitrage as a game. When someone mentions a problem, try to think of solutions. The solutions come from my experience and knowledge, and my tool kit of friends and associates. Think: How can my network help? It’s a sort of ongoing puzzle, matching up the right people and the right opportunities.
2. Just do it. Don’t wait to be asked. People aren't used to looking for others for help, beyond a small circle, and usually either won't think of it or will be too polite to ask.
3. Don't limit yourself to one clique. Make a point of knowing as many people from as many different professions and social groups as possible. The ability to bridge different worlds, and even different people within the same profession, is a key attribute in managers who are paid better and promoted faster.
4. Become a knowledge broker. Knowledge is free—it can be found in books, in articles, on the Internet, pretty much everywhere, and it’s precious to everyone. Expertise will not only allow you to grow your connections, it helps you solve problems in situations where there’s a gap in your network.
5. Carpe Diem. When you see a way that someone else in your network can help a friend, don’t wait. Pick up the phone mid-conversation to make the introduction – “I’m here with my friend so-and-so and they need x and may call you, if it’s alright” – then give your friend the information so they can follow up as they choose. Not only have you made it completely comfortable for them to reach out, you’ve also pinged someone else in your network – double score.

Successfully connecting with others is never about simply getting what you want. It’s about getting what you want and making sure that people who are important to you get what they want first - and having fun while doing it.

6 comments // In Relationship Development Skills

Greenlight Community Ambassador Tami Conner, who has also worked with FG as an instructional design consultant, came up with a great guest blog of “relationship truths,” organized around a cool insight: Relationships are alive. Now here's Tami:

Living Relationships
By Tami Conner

Relationships, like humans or plants, are "alive" and thus require:

1) Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state. This refers to the cohesion, or balance, of a relationship, and involves expressing needs, trustworthiness, loyalty, asking for and giving help, working through conflict, owning up to bad behaviors and fixing them, and regular conscious interaction.

2) Organization: Structural composition. There are different types of relationships that serve different purposes and fulfill different needs. All relationships are different, and all relationships are personal.

3) Metabolism: Transformation of energy. Interpersonal interaction. Relationships, like plants or humans, have varying nutritional needs. Feed them what they need, and they will grow.

4) Growth: A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter. If only one area of a relationship grows, i.e., the transactional business component but not the interpersonal intimacy component, it will wither and die when that one component is neglected or no longer needed. Think of it this way - if you don't know someone beyond their immediate business need, which you quickly fill, why should that person continue to care about you and the relationship?

5) Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. I like to think of my lifetime friendships (or lifeline relationships, as Keith calls them) as being highly adaptive. These are the folks that grow and change with you. A generous and candid relationship adapts itself to your life, over time, as the individuals in the relationship progress through this journey we call "our life."

6) Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms. For example, responses to deeper intimacy, reciprocal generosity, increased candor, and greater accountability.

7) Reproduction: The ability to produce new relationships.

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In talking about lifeline relationships on the WGYB teleseminar call today with Tim Ferriss and Guy Kawasaki (thanks so much to them both!), Guy said something important:

Author & Blogger Guy Kawasaki

"I don’t think this is something where you read the book and you go on a manhunt to find those three people [who'll change your life] right away. I feel that this is something that takes 6-9 months. It is going to take a lot of time and patience to make sure that you have the right people around you."

This is so true. If you read Who's Got Your Back and go out in the world thinking you'll line up your lifelines like you're shopping for apples at the grocery store, you'll give up quickly. And the fact that it takes time to develop lifelines is why its so important that you start trying to cultivate them today.

Don't let a week go by that you make an effort (from a ping all the way to a long, slow dinner) to get closer to someone in or out of your current circle. Take that chance.

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Last week I taped Larry King and the link is online now. His show still makes me nervous!

Below is my Larry King story from Who's Got Your Back. I use it as a "how-not-to" example when I explain the need to create an authentic environment to build relationships. Painful but true.

From Who's Got Your Back:

One of my least authentic moments—one I’ve never forgotten—came after the success of Never Eat Alone, when I was invited to a private dinner in Chicago with Larry King. When I arrived, Larry said, “So you’re the next Harvey Mackay?” Harvey Mackay, of course, is the best-selling author of Swim with the Sharks, and a great speaker who has appeared numerous times on King’s TV show. “We’ll have to do something with you,” King said.

Wow! I thought. Larry King has just met me and is already talking about having me on his show! But instead of just being myself, trying to talk to and better understand Larry King the man, I spent the whole dinner performing. I was self-conscious, scared, and trying way too hard to impress him. I peppered Larry and others at the dinner with questions, tossed out witty barbs, and completely dominated the con-versation. Instead of stepping back, letting King explore our newfound relationship at his own pace, and hearing what others had to say—instead of being real—I’d donned the mantle of Mr. In-Charge.

I could see from his body language that King was put off by my silly, misguided performance. (Somebody get the hook! I could almost hear him thinking.) But I was so nervous and agitated that instead of backing off, I just poured on the charm harder. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get invited on the show back then.

4 comments // In Relationship Development Skills

I’ve got a guest post on Steve Leveen's Blog about how to get kids to get the most out of college – go check it out:

http://blog.wellreadlife.com/my_weblog/2009/05/how-to-get-kids-to-get-the-most-from-collegepart-2.html

1 comment // In Relationship Development Skills