Does Networking Sometimes Make You Feel Stupid? Get Better in Networking By Following These Simple Steps

It is not enough to have more than five hundred friends on Facebook or connections on LinkedIn. A long email list does not mean that you are great at building relationships and leveraging your network. In a previous post, we emphasized the importance of networking for eye care professionals and we highlighted the essential role of trust. We also pointed to networking as different than social media and the two of them should not be confounded. A way to look at trust when you have a lot of social media friends and connections is to start by asking yourself how many among your friends and connections ask you for a favor or advice on a given day? How many of your friends would you ask for help? How many of them would you help if they asked you to? When was the last time someone updated you with his latest work other than what you saw them share? when was the last time you reached out to your contacts on LinkedIn and told them about your latest work or offered help?

When you start asking those questions you will discover how well you are employing your relationships on social media and how would you network to leverage your network instead. Truth be told networking is one of the hardest skills to master because it needs time and good evaluation of what happened in order to apply learned experience. A few tips to getting you into networking in the first place and improve your professional networking skills at a later stage include:

Start by determining your professional goals and more importantly have a well-defined purpose. You should be genuine and original in bringing about what help you can be for others. Only by genuinely discovering what you can help others with that you will expect others to come forward and decide to help you;

Having well-defined goals and genuine purpose is not enough, you have to decide who’s going to be onboard the same ship and how they can add value to what you are offering. To have to figure out how they can influence their connections too;

You should become able to convey a message about who you are, what you do, what your professional goals are, and how you can affect or change others’ lives in less than 30 seconds;

Join professional organizations in your area and internationally in order to regularly attend meetings, participate in chapters, and present and talk about what you do whenever possible. Let your social media network and your connections of forums, discussion rooms, and chat sessions know that you are attending in-person meetings and events local and international, and make every moment an opportunity to reach out to somebody and have a coffee with him;

Follow up with new contacts after you meet up at events and conferences. Give time to write and update them about what you have been working on since the last time you’ve met and how you can help each other out. When networking during an event, or when you are following up, avoid seeking data collection. Don’t press on getting answers to your questions when you meet up with a more knowledgeable person. Instead, try to always be casual and lead the conversation flow in a friendly and familiar way and not too professional. Don’t stop at what you can only contribute but focus on others’ perspectives and listen to their opinions in order to give the opportunity for a network effect to occur and provide more value to each one as more individuals join the network.