Be live and in person
You’d be surprised how many spaces are available for rent in your city – or will even sponsor you for free if you can guarantee a certain number of people will show up.
Sometimes at the end of the day, the last thing you may want to do is get dressed up and go behave professionally in front of a group of people. Once you get there, you’ll probably change your mind. And that’s coming from an introvert who was once also painfully shy.
Don’t have the resources or reasons to put on an event? Go to area Meetups and Tweetups that are already being held. Join associations in your area that have networking events. Find events on Eventbrite, LinkedIn, Facebook, Lanyrd, Plancast, and elsewhere. Walk up to people and introduce yourself. Talk to people and make the conversation about them. There will be plenty of time to find out if you have something they need.
Why is this worth it?
By now you’re probably wondering why you should put all this extra effort into making closer connections, especially if you’re not necessarily looking to make friends. It’s the same reason you pass along the link to your favorite band’s next concert, but not from the guy in your building that plays the drums at 3 am.
One of them you like, and feel is part of your life even though you’ve never met them. The other one you probably see in the hall every day, who you deeply and sincerely hate, even though you act civilized when you see them.
We give to and buy from people and companies that enrich our lives and provide value to us. If we aren’t convinced of that value yet, it helps us stick around to find out if they make an extra effort to be of use to us in other ways – not to mention if they make an extra effort just to be nice while we’re deciding.
We like to belong. We don’t do favors for strangers – at least not the same ones we do for people we know or resonate with.
So if you aren’t getting enough tweets for your blog posts – but the ones you are say your work is fantastic – maybe you aren’t making enough of an effort to connect your content to people who would share it. Or maybe that connection is forgotten as soon as they’re done talking to you on Twitter.
Social media is great but it’s the icing on the cake. Maybe even the facilitator of the icing. Leverage it to make deeper connections to people. Most of them won’t be friendships, per se, but there is a relationship being created. Like all others, it needs work to continue to live.
