Do I know you?

I come from probably the last generation which has seen both the manual way of connecting with people as well as the electronic way of doing the same thing. We didn’t have cellphones, internet, social and professional networking options when we started off with our careers and definitely not at the pricing that they are available at today, these came during the course of our younger professional life. So we still use both these means to connect with people for both personal & professional networking and do believe that one is as efficient as the other, the only difference being that in today’s online & smartphone friendly world, it’s faster to connect with someone online than in the real world.

When you are a young professional, your group largely comprises of people you have been friends with, have worked with, school & college buddies or even some random person you met at a friend’s party or during one crazy night of clubbing…it quiet doesn’t matter since you are young, adventurous, meet a lot of interesting & not so interesting people and connect with them instantly in today’s 24*7 online age. However, its only when we cross a certain time frame in our life and mature enough in age, do we realise the trivialities that we have been indulging in during our younger days and acknowledge the need to expand the network, personal as well as professional.

I have been on many networking portals for as long as they have been in existence and to begin with most of my connections on these portals have been people I have known personally for quite some time or have met through common connections or they’ve been part of a common activity group. Basically, I’ve been interacting with these people for a long time for them to be aware of what’s happening in my life or not.

Not until recently (about 3 yrs back) did I have people, whom I barely knew, in my network. The change was largely governed by the fact that I had joined a social activity group that a friend had started to beautify the city and it enabled me in meeting some very interesting people, mostly younger than me but such a talented lot. And I’m still regularly in touch with them. That’s on the personal social front. On the professional front, I used to connect with a lot of people over LinkedIn, some of whom accepted and many of whom did not (no hard feelings). Sometime later, I was being approached by many people I did not know, which for a long time, made me think as to the reason for this. One fine day it struck me that most of the connection requests were due to my professional position in an organisation. I didn’t mind connecting with them at all; over the period of time these requests increased and helped everyone exchange ideas and thoughts, share leads with each other, explore probable partnerships and also help each other out in times of need, which was great. It didn’t (& still hasn’t) quite matter that the people interacting have never met personally, after all that’s what networking is all about, isn’t it?

However, until recently I used to follow the rule of adding professionals randomly (guilty as charged) the same way I was getting requests to connect, but then something happened.  A friend, who’s in the digital field, shared a blog post on his profile which was largely about connecting with people – on how unprofessional it is to send random invites to people you don’t know on LinkedIn or any other networking site for that matter and how those invites miss the mark on initiating the first line of communication between the two. My forte being Communication, this article got me thinking and so I chose to go along with the recommendations that the author had made in the blog. Since then every time I send a connect invite to someone I know or don’t, I add in a small message to them as to why I’d like to connect with them (the message boiler plate has a word limit, mind you, so be crisp & precise). If the communication is being initiated on any other networking platform, it’s always nice to introduce yourself briefly and request for the person’s email id (if it’s for work) or generally a connection request on Facebook or any other similar platform. It’s been almost six months and I’ve connected with quite a few people since and had some great discussions, conversations and in some cases it’s even had work materialisation as well. I highly recommend this route to everyone, it will avoid the question – Do I Know You?

Although, I’m not able to locate that blog that I had read on this friend’s profile, here is another one in which Kristin Burnham talks about author Lewis Howes’ book LinkedWorking: Generating Success On The World’s Largest Professional Networking Website, taking references from it.

So the next time you chose to send an invitation to connect, do take out a few seconds to write in an introductory message and personalise it. It goes a long way in initiating that first conversation between two individuals and you never know it could materialise in generating some useful leads too.

PS: The images used in this post are purely for representation purposes found on Google and the author of the blog does not own the Copyright for them. Due credit to the artist’s & designer’s who’ve developed them.