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 in the last two years. Twice I’ve stood up to the bullies and been counted, but once I haven’t.

Let’s talk about the two times I spoke up against the bullies. Interestingly, these two people – one whom is highly regarded, and one who isn’t, had one thing in common. After being privately and publicly being challenged about the lies, which they were spreading about myself and my reputation, they went quiet. Everyone makes mistakes and gets it wrong once in a while – hell if they didn’t I wouldn’t have made such a good living as a learning and development professional over the years.  But, in my book, if you make a mistake you should be ‘man’ enough to stand up and be counted and say you made a mistake. The great thing about these bullies is that when you do stand up to them, they rapidly disappear.

Social networking can be very faceless. It’s easy in the moment to get caught up in the conversation and when everyone else is piling in and abusing someone, to join in too. This can lead to some very unpleasant nastiness online.  How many of us remember that behind every character typed is a finger which belongs to a person who has thoughts and feelings too? If you were sitting next to the person you were verbally abusing at the time, would you still type what you are typing?

Now let’s talk about the third time I’ve been cyber bullied. I’m sure that the unsolicited and highly critical feedback I’ve been given on a few occasions by this person, probably started honestly ‘for my own benefit’. If you are wondering, I’ve always politely acknowledged the feedback, but each time it’s been given it’s made me cry inside. Why me? What have I done to deserve this treatment?

If you are reading this and wondering what I have done to vanquish this particular bully, then I will disappoint you. Nothing. I’ve not been brave enough to tell them how they made me feel. Which means I’ve let them take control of my emotions and self-respect and I hate them for this. Sometimes when a line has been crossed, you have to state that a line has been crossed and enough is enough. I’m at that point now.

Writing this blog has helped me get to that point. This is my way of saying, I’ve taken control again of the situation and I want my self-respect back.

How have you personally coped with cyber-bullies?

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 a bulk LinkedIn message from one of my contacts. Why was I surprised? It was one of my contacts whom I truly believed really did know his stuff on social media. In fact, up until that point I would have recommended him, as one of the guys who really was a social media expert.

Something wasn’t right. This guy knew his stuff and walked his walk and talked his talk – or so I thought. So, I sent a rather terse message in reply and asked why he’d risk damaging his credibility by sending me and others this ‘send all’ LinkedIn message.

I received a very quick and apologetic response. Apparently, I’d been sent this e-mail message by mistake as his Virtual Assistant (VA) had ignored his very specific instructions about who would receive what message. Interestingly, I wasn’t the only one to express their displeasure at receiving the LinkedIn message. I duly thanked my contact for his openness and honesty, and told him that he had reaffirmed my faith in his expertise. I also felt very sorry for my contact that he’d spent all afternoon on damage limitation because his VA had ignored his specific instructions.

So, what can we learn from this episode?

• An apology if given genuinely is essential to rebuilding your credibility with a member of your network
• Be exceptionally careful how you guide and direct any employees or outsourced admin support on how they should communicate in your name. If it is realistic, do check anything that is sent out in your name.
• You need to openly show how you have ‘put right the wrong’ as well as apologise. Done sincerely, it can actually increase your credibility in the eyes of others.

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. Lisa diligently chased her opposite number at the potential client’s organization, but e-mails, messages and phone calls were just not returned. So, I took the task back and went straight to my contact. I got the silent treatment as well…

It’s at this point that you tend to think that the worst has happened. i.e. the client has decided to not proceed – even though they were so keen just a few weeks ago. However, most of the time it’s not that the worst has happened. In fact here are just a few reasons why your phone call is not being returned:

1) The work is now no longer an organisational priority – however, this could change.

2) Your contact is either on holiday or signed off sick

3) Your potential client has a temporary or permanent cash flow problem

4) You’ve mucked up and annoyed the potential client

5) Your contact is overwhelmed with work and/or meetings

6) Your contact is an e-mail person rather than a phone call person

7) Your diaries are not matching

As you can see, there are many reasons why your potential client is not returning your call. Your priority is not to lose heart but to remain visible, and find out the reason for the phone calls not being returned. In my case, the client did finally get in touch and it was as I had thought – their budget had been cut and they wanted to postpone the work until later in the year.

What do you do when your potential clients are not returning your call?

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 time they talk with you; although, very rarely this does actually happen. You know and I know, that when you sell a high priced or complex service, clients do need time to make their mind up to sign on the dotted line. But, silence from a potential client can mean two things – either they need longer to make their mind up, or they are not interested. Which means you need to follow up with a client, but in a way that helps them get closer to buying from you OR enables them to tell you that they are not going to buy from you.

Here are some ideas to help you to do just that:

1)     When you are speaking with your potential client, do ask them when would be appropriate for you, and how, to contact them if you have not heard anything. This means that you are not being pushy as they have given you permission to follow up.

2)     If your potential client is active on social media, make sure you have a dialogue on social media with them. I’m not talking about directly asking them about the potential work – just retweeting their content, “liking” their updates, commenting on their discussions or answering their questions.

3)     If you’ve not heard anything for a week, then send your potential client a quick e-mail asking them if they have made any decisions yet, or whether there is anything you can help them with to help them get to a decision.

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 a room’ for a hour or so
• I always struggled with the informal socialising in the evenings on residential courses that I was leading
• I have to sneak away at big family events at least once or twice in the day for some me time
• At lunch times and break times on workshops when I am a delegate I would sometimes prefer to NOT talk to people
• I have to psych myself up before I enter a room full of strangers
• I really don’t like working a room and would much prefer to talk to one or two people at an event

However, all this doesn’t fit with the tag I’ve been given as a ‘networking expert’. I think that the normal stereotype of a networking expert is someone who:

• has a large and influential network (tick)
• is good at connecting people (tick)
• is always happy to be around and socialising with people (nope!)
• is an out and out people person (nope!)

I’ve previously blogged about the fact that both extroverts and introverts have different skills and talents which help them both be great networkers.

What’s your thoughts on today’s ramblings?

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, these guys, time and time again, help their members become ninja networkers who build their businesses one referral at a time.

However, we were not there to talk about face to face networking. It was the dreaded S word – social media. Yesterday was all about helping the directors, utilise online networking tools within their regions. As you can imagine, in the room, there was a certain amount of healthy scepticism and fear about the online networking world.

I have strongly believed, and advocated over the years that it’s not about ‘on’ OR ‘off’ line networking. It’s about AND. If you strip away the technology, there are the same principles and skills for offline networking and online networking. Very simply, if you wouldn’t do something in a face to face networking environment, then don’t do it in an on line networking environment.

For example, lets’s consider some situations to illustrate this:

1) When you first meet someone in person, I’m guessing you will be very polite, be helpful, try not and offend and chit chat a little? The last thing you would do is push your business card at them and try and get them to sign up for your facebook page and mailing list.The same goes for online networking. So, why do many people when online treat the first conversation as the start of the sales process?

2) When your conversation meeting someone for the first time in person starts to move from small talk, I’m guessing you probably move a little closer together. You’ll probably now be making strong eye contact – and you are now starting in what I call a ‘closed’ formation. The social networking equivalent of this is when you start to converse via private message rather than public message.

3) It doesn’t matter whether you meet someone online or offline, but if they don’t demonstrate their credibility to you, then you are not going to refer or recommend their services to others.

4) Success from networking is based on the strength of your relationships. How you maintain these relationships is up to you, but regular communication is key to maintaining and building these relationships. You have a choice to communication via real time methods or virtual methods.

What do you think?

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 received. So, you can imagine the slightly flippant recommendation I was thinking of writing… However, I behaved myself and wrote a polite little note back explaining that as I had never worked with him, I didn’t want to damage either of our credibility by writing him a recommendation.

Asking people you have never worked with – or even met in person – is a really stupid and desperate thing to do on LinkedIn. (Not mincing my words today!) It stinks of desperation and raises the very real thought that you have potential problems with your current delivery of service. This lead me to think about some other really stupid things you can do on LinkedIn.

Another old chestnut is to send all your tweets through to your LinkedIn status. All that does is frustrate your LinkedIn connections who are finding that their LinkedIn wall is filled up with your chit chat on twitter. If you are like me you hide this person’s status update. Which then becomes a permanent change, because who has the time to check back and see if any of the people whose status updates they have hidden has changed their viewing habits?

A third really stupid thing to do is to treat your LinkedIn connections as an extension of your mailing list. I eventually unconnected myself from a Northern based evangelical new NABO networking group leader, who didn’t seem to understand that when I said I was uncomfortable with Retweeting his NABO tweets, I probably wasn’t going to travel 300 miles to go to the launch and subsequent events. This is probably an extreme example, but on several occasions I’ve connected with someone on LinkedIn and immediately been sent via e-mail or LinkedIn an opportunity to attend their event. I, like many others connect with someone on LinkedIn to build a relationship, not get immediately sold too. Treating your LinkedIn connections as an extension of your mailing list is likely to get you unconnected and possibly reported for Spam. It doesn’t take that many people to report you for Spam before your account gets suspended.

This is similar to my last point. Think before you decide to invite all your LinkedIn connections in a mass message to the latest event you are prompting. This kind of messaging may have the opposite effect to the one you intended – irritation. You may be amused that in the past I’ve been ‘personally’ invited to a 2-day launch event in Auckland, by a so called networking expert (well OK, if you pay the air fare and appearance fee! ), a beginners workshop on social media taking place over 100 miles away…

What other stupid things have you seen people do on LinkedIn?

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 back to a manual update of my lists, then I may as well have a good spring clean of my list’s membership and what I am tweeting generally. Here are some of the tasks which I will be doing as part of my spring clean:

1) checking that my ‘prospecting’ lists are up to date, and visible on my preferred dashboard software (tweet deck on laptop, hoot suite on iPad). Making sure that I check these lists daily and engage with the people on the list.

2) taking a long hard look at my ‘people to stay close to list’, which contains past/current/potential clients, key introducers and key contacts. I know this is not up to date!

3) regaining visibility with my new followers, so I can start to engage with anyone who looks commercially or personally interesting to me.

4) changing my RSS to twitter feeds. I’ve seen some great new networking related content which I want to highlight to my followers.

5) I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I want to set up a list of people who provide great content. This makes it much simpler to use buffer to regularly share good content from others.

6) I will also take a long hard look at the twitter accounts which I follow who haven’t tweeted in the last month. Should I be following these people?

How do you spring clean your twitter account?

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 showcase what I do (but not selling)”

Tough ask!

Starting a conversation is easy – see my previous post on 27 great conversation starters. It’s the maintaining whilst highlighting your credentials, without being boring that’s tough. It’s also harder when your profession, like the accountants, has gained a reputation/stereotype (often very unfairly) for being boring.

So, what’s the solution here?

The first thing to think about is stories. People who you meet networking, don’t want a dry, detailed summary of your services when they ask you ‘so, what do you do?’. They want to be entertained and given lots of opportunities to create a conversation with you from your answer. Stories enable you and them to do this.

But, I’m not just talking about any old stories. I’m talking about credibility stories – you may have heard of them as war stories or sales stories. These are stories which illustrate what you do, who you do it for and the results which you help your clients achieve. They are succinct and to the point and unlike most stories have no middle. Yes, no middle.

A typical story will explain why the client hired you in the first place and the pain they were suffering before they hired you. Then, you’ll fast forward straight to the end of the story, and talk about the happy ending for the client, as a result of using your services.

It’s always worth having a few of these stories which you can use at anyone time. I’ll explain why. These stories are the substance in your 60 second elevator pitch and need to link to what you are asking people for. They can be used as the answer to any of these standard questions which you will receive at a networking event:

• how’s business?
• what do you do?
• got any interesting client work on at the moment?
• what does you business specialise in?

Ideally, you want to tailor your credibility story to who is standing in front of you – which is why you need a few tucked away in your tool kit.

Of course, these stories are just the ticket for meetings with prospects who want to know whether you can help them or not with their specific problems.

What credibility stories do you regularly use?

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 mutually beneficial relationships. If you focus all your energy on finding relationships and very little on the building and maintaining relationships, then (and how do I say this sensitively?) you are wasting your time networking. There, I’ve said it – I’ve named the elephant in the room here.

Let me explain. If you sell a high priced service or product – which most of us do – there needs to be significant levels of trust and credibility established before either someone will buy from you or recommend your services to others. I am sure at one level, we all get this. However, why do so many professionals and people with business development responsibilities have a flawed belief that they can go into a room of strangers and walk out with invoiceable business? You may be thinking, but I don’t fall into this trap. I’m sure you don’t, but have a look at how you are spending your networking time. If you are spending more than 20% of your networking time finding relationships and connecting with people you’ve not met before, then sorry, you are falling into this trap.

Yes, you heard me right, 80% of your networking time needs to be spent on the building and maintaining relationships part of networking. Which means if you have 10 hours to spend on networking a week, 2 hours can be focused on finding new relationships, i.e. via LinkedIn, face-to-face networking events, conferences, and 8 hours having conversations, spending time and helping out your existing contacts in your network. I will tend to only go to face to face networking events if I can meet at least 2 of my existing network there. Or if there is someone who is so strategically important to me going to be there. Otherwise, why bother attending these random type of events?

It saddens me that there is a whole industry built up around the perception that you can win business by only working a room? Maybe that’s a strong opinion, but why else are there so many mix and mingle events? In case you are wondering, I believe that organisations like 4N, BNI, Athena, chambers of commerce can add real value with the networking opportunities which they offer. However, if all you do is get addicted to meeting people with the hope you’ll eventually bump into a client, there are far better (i.e. effective) ways to use your valuable marketing time.

What’s your thoughts?