I want to start a conversation about something that is often swept under the table in social networking and social media circles. Cyber bullying. Just like its ‘real life’ version, it happens, it’s real and it’s not always confined to the classroom or school playground. In fact, I’ve come up against cyber bullies three times [...]
Now, regular readers of my blog will know the one of the easiest ways to irritate me is send me a ‘bulk’ message via LinkedIn asking me to attend a social media training session aimed at beginners. So, you could have knocked me down with a feather when I received one of these invites via [...]
by Heather Townsend on April 5, 2012 · 1 comment
It was all going so well. In fact, as it turned out too well… All I needed to do was agree dates with the client for a series of workshops worth nearly £10k to us. That should be the easy part? Right? Wrong! I delegated the job of agreeing dates to my chief organiser, Lisa. [...]
No word of a lie, word-for-word, this was what greeted me in a recent e-mail from my client. It’s a question I pondered for literally years until I spent some time working with Jon, my business partner, and former sales trainer for BP. Typically most potential clients are not yet ready to buy the first [...]
Yesterday, I finally admitted to myself that I am an introvert. This shouldn’t be a big deal. After all, it’s fine to know that in social situations you will be expending energy (as introverts do) rather than gaining energy from social interactions with others (as extroverts do). It also explains why: I’m shattered after ‘working [...]
by Heather Townsend on March 21, 2012 · 0 comments
Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to work with BNI’s UK and Ireland executive directors. I felt very privileged to be working with such a supportive and positive group of people. It’s also very unusual for networking expert like myself to get the opportunity to work with a diverse group of face-to-face referral marketing experts. Yes, [...]
by Heather Townsend on March 20, 2012 · 1 comment
I was asked to endorse someone on LinkedIn yesterday. Nothing unusual in that. However, I’d never worked with them, in any capacity, never known anyone who had worked with them. I’d only exchanged one or two tweets…. I also vaguely remember my suggestion, some time ago, to help strengthen his LinkedIn profile was not well [...]
by Heather Townsend on March 15, 2012 · 0 comments
The sad demise of formulists has meant it’s time for me to do a long overdue spring clean on Twitter. For the last 18 months I have had Formulists working on my behalf automatically managing my list membership for me. This means it’s back to manually updating my lists (damn!) If, I’ve got to go [...]
After training over 200+ professionals in the last 6 months on their networking skills, I noticed that there was a common theme to what people found hard to do when networking. This theme, went something like this: “how do I start and maintain an interesting conversation, whilst not being boring, but use this conversation to [...]
by Heather Townsend on March 13, 2012 · 0 comments
A good friend of mine, Rob Brown has a great quote, which I often recite: “stop counting conversations, and make conversations count” Which is so true. However, in my opinion, so many people spend all their networking effort and time collecting contacts. Whereas, in my view effective business networking is about ‘finding, building and maintaining [...]
Jon Baker is a Business Coach, Sales Trainer and Experienced Public Speaker. Jon specialises in working with partners and owners from the smaller professional practices.