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How do you stand out when you’re networking? Are you just another face in the crowd or is there something you say, do or exhibit that demonstrates your uniqueness?

My friend Ragen and her business partner Willi really stick out in a crowd; attending networking events in professional attire and big pink fluffy slippers! You see they represent a team of Virtual Assistants who are very professional and qualified, but work from home. (I’m not sure if the pink slippers are part of their Virtual Assistant’s uniform or not, you’ll have to ask Ragen).

Their appearance at networking events is just the beginning of their differentiation. What really sets them apart from many other networkers you’ll meet is their unique business model. Just take a look at these capabilities and success stories:

—

Ragen and Willi from Cloud Nine Virtual Office Staffing aren’t the only professionals in their pajamas.  Their Virtual Assistant Team is full of exceptionally qualified professionals doing every administrative, telemarketing and bookkeeping task you can imagine, all from their homes.

• Our VAs are exceptionally qualified, and have all passed our seriously stringent assessment process (less than 1 in 200 pass)  
• No need to waste money on extra space or equipment
• Use exactly as much help as you need - there is no minimum or maximum number of hours
• No payroll or HR headaches
• We are a team so, even though you are assigned a specific VA for your account, back-up is always available in case of emergency
• We make it easy, even if you’re technologically challenged

One of the recruiters in my network replied:

[In an effort to shorten this story I’ve edited Chris’ play by play of the aftermath. Long story short he was told that he had the job, but later had the rug pulled out on the offer based on the CFO’s "assessment of the current economic conditions." Chris continued to explore other opportunities as this was transpiring.]

• Networking to Your Next Job: Using Existing Relationships
• Networking to Your Next Job: Starting From Scratch
• Unemployed Networking: Maintaining Your Professional Identity
• Best of Breed Tools for a Job Search in the Time of Web 2.0
• Helping a job seeker: The Ultimate Referral
• Networking Up The Ladder Inside Your Company
• Job Networking in Austin, Texas

NetworkInAustin.com

It seems that everyone I talk to lately is incredibly busy. I know I am. This causes us to look more and more at how we’re spending our time to try and find ways we can be most effective. In the last few weeks I’ve had several opportunities to combine networking with other activities. Each of these different events were fantastic and I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d like to find more ways to do this.

As I was thinking about writing this blog post it dawned on me that I already combine networking with other activities quite well. Being that I do a huge portion of my networking during lunch is the perfect example. For some combining coffee and networking would count, but being that I don’t ordinarily drink coffee doesn’t exactly put this in the win column for me. Golf is another tried and true combination networking opportunity utilized by many.

This morning I went on a great 20+ mile bike ride with CJ Romberger and Brian Massey. I can’t think of many other ways to combine burning 800+ calories with great conversation and relationship building. In fact I’m pretty sure we’re on our way to working together in a meaningful way on a project (stay tuned for details).

A couple of weeks ago Chris Garrigues put together the second Twitter Playdate where he helped gather a number of local professionals who use Twitter at Zilker Park with our kids on a Sunday afternoon.

In both of these examples networking was combined with activities that are important by themselves, and serve to bring us even closer together via our shared interest (cycling/kids).

Here are a few other ideas:

• Networking and many types of exercise: Running, Cycling, Walking, Golf, Weight Lifting, etc. (Swimming… Not so much)
• Volunteer - Bring a group of people together and do some good in the community together.
• Put together a dinner party and include spouses/significant others.
• Wine Tasting - Do you have a love for wine? What a great excuse to bring people together
• Favorite Hobby? Bring others who share your passion together around this special interest

These aren’t exactly unique ideas. I’d be willing to bet that some of your closest friendships have been developed around activities or interests that you share with another person. These are a major source of accidental networking connections. I’m suggesting you be just a bit more intentional about the activities you love and the people you’d like to build better relationships with.

What other experiences and activites can you combine with your networking efforts? No really, I want to know. Please add your own comment, story or suggestion to this blog post. Thanks!

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

I am a huge fan of business books. They’re about all I read unless I’m on vacation. As a lover of business I find just about every book in this category to be mentally stimulating.

A few days ago I asked my Twitter Followers what the best/most impactful business book they’d read in the last year was. They could only select 1.

The hands down winner was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris.

All of the other suggestions are listed below in this handy widget. Hopefully this serves as a handy jumping off point as you select your own next business book read.

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

A few weeks ago I blogged about the concept of Passionate Involvement. On November 5th there is an incredible opportunity for you to find your own passion and get involved. Next Wednesday Greenlights for NonProfit Success, The Junior League of Austin, Leadership Austin along with Comerica Bank and Vinson & Elkins will present the Fall 2008 Board Summit.

This event will be held from 5:45 - 8:00pm at Vinson & Elkins (2801 Via Fortuna #100) and Registration is only $35.00

You’ll have the opportunity to network with 150+ business professionals and listen to business and community leaders talk about nonprofit board service.

The best part is you’ll have a low-risk opportunity to learn about 20 diverse, pre-screened local nonprofit organizations that are actively looking for board members just like you.

There are so many reasons you should attend this event. Do yourself a favor and Register Right Now!

Here is a little more information and links to the websites of each of the 20 participating nonprofits:

AIDS Services of Austin, Inc.

Mission: AIDS Services of Austin responds to the HIV needs of the Austin area by providing services that enhance the health and well being of individuals and the community in the face of an evolving epidemic.

American YouthWorks

Mission: Building productive lives and better communities.

Anthropos Arts

Mission: Anthropos brings professional Latin and jazz musicians into low-iincome public schools (Grades 6-12) to lead students through free music programs: workshops, individualized lessons, concerts, and master classes.

Austin Child Guidance Center

Mission: To improve the mental health of children and their families through early intervention, diagnosis and treatment to help them develop the emotional skills for meeting life’s challenges.

Big Brothers, Big Sisters

Mission: To help children reach their potential through professionally supported one-to-one relationships.

Breast Cancer Resource Centers of Texas

Mission: To be a centralized source for breast cancer information, education and support that enables women to become active, knowledgeable, participants in their healthcare.

Camp Fire USA Balcones Council

Mission: Camp Fire USA builds caring, confident youth and future leaders by engaging children and their families in inclusive, coeducational activities.

Citizen Schools

Mission: To change the life trajectories of low-income students. We challenge them to be producers, leaders, and stewards of their own futures. We strive to move them onto a “success track,” heading toward high school graduation, college attainment, and positions of leadership in their careers and communities. Citizen Schools also seeks to lead the nation to reconsider the traditional school day and to re-imagine a new “learning day.”

Crime Prevention Institute

Mission: To break the cycle of crime and strengthen individuals, families and communities by supporting individuals with education, information, resources and case management as they transition from incarceration to communities.

Down Home Ranch

Mission: To build a rural, self-reliant community for adults with intellectural and developmental disabilities, offering training, housing, recreation, and dignified employment, as well as opportunities for growth in mind, body, and spirit.

EmanciPET

Mission: To provide services and advocacy that will result in a more humane and effective approach to controlling our pet population.

Girls Rock Camp Austin (GRCA)

Mission: Girls Rock Camp Austin is dedicated to empowering girls and women of all backgrounds and abilities through musical eduation and performance.

Heart House of Austin

Mission: Heart House is a safe place for under-served children to be every day after school where free programs teach them how to be successful in school and in life and to think critically and be self sufficient, kind and responsible citizens.

Launch Pad Job Club

Mission: To present programs that lead to employment of its members through networking, training, and maintaining a positive attitude.

Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Mission: Cure Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma and improve the quality of life for patients and their families.

Mobile Film School

Mission: The Mobile Film School is committed to bringing media arts education to rural and underserved communities; creating long-term mentoring relationships by pairing students with seasoned industry professionals and educators, and cultivating a unique appreciation of local history and culture using storytelling in film.

SAHELI for Asian Families

Mission: SAHELI helps and empowers Asian victims and survivors of domestic abuse, improves their access to services and increases community awareness of various forms of violence and oppression.

Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering

Mission: Enabling Texas students to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) by creating partnerships among educators, industry, government, and families to inform, educate and motivate students with particular focus on underrepresented populations.

The Care Communities

Mission: Provide practical, compassionate, non-medical care through our volunteer care teams to people with AIDS or cancer so they may live in their homes for as long as possible.

Waterloo Counseling Center

Mission: To provide affordable mental health counseling services and training with an expertise in gender and sexual diversity.

Wonders & Worries

Mission: Wonders & Worries helps children cope when their parent or caregiver has a chronic or life-threatening illness.

YMCA of Austin

Mission: To put Christian principles into practice through programs that build a healthy spirit, mind and body for all.

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

The number of social/online networking tools is, to put it bluntly, overwhelming. From Business Blogs to Twitter, LinkedIn to Facebook, Plaxo to MySpace and everything in between the choices are astounding. Hopefully you’re using at least one of these tools, even if it’s only casually.

The trick is to develop your own strategy in how you utilize these tools so they don’t take over your life. If done incorrectly the time you spend on e-mail and your social networking activities will consume ALL of your available time. That would be bad, unless that’s your business.

So how do you develop this strategy? First an understand of what you’re trying to accomplish would be very helpful. Personally I have three primary goals when utilizing these tools.

1. Maintain or deepen connections with people I’ve already met.
2. Build visibility for myself and the things I work on and am passionate about, and attract other like minded people to me through these efforts.
3. Find appropriate contacts and make connections through referrals/introductions.
4. Initiate new professional relationships that make sense.

Once you’re clear about your goals you can start to think about how you’ll use each tool.

I’ll share with you 2 of my own examples:

I’ve already written about My LinkedIn Networking Philosophy I encourage you to read that. Very generally LinkedIn is a way for me to maintain contact with people I have a genuine connection with. That way if they change jobs or move I don’t lose track of them because all of their other contact information changed. I have a way of being in the loop. It also helps me see relational connections. For example if I want to meet the CEO of a prospective company and they’re on LinkedIn I can see our mutual connections and potentially ask those individuals to make an introduction for me.

Twitter is quickly becoming my new favorite tool. I avoided this one for a long time because from the outside it sounds just plain goofy and like it will be a colossal waste of time. Turns out it’s the best relationship deepener I’ve ever seen. People I know well who I follow on Twitter I now know really, really well. Even more impactful are those that I kinda know, and have the ability to get to know at a much deeper level. It’s a little hard to explain just how this works. I highly recommend you just quickly create an account, follow a few people and see what you think. You’re welcome to start with my profile just to get an idea: www.twitter.com/scottingram

Over time I will go deeper into the use of each of these tools (stay tuned!). In the mean time your best bet is to just begin to play with a couple of these sites. Here’s a little bit of generic guidance on the order in which you should explore these sites and why.

If you are a business professional this is my opinion of the order of importance of these tools:

1. LinkedIn - If you’re a professional you MUST be on LinkedIn.
2. Facebook - It’s less geared toward professionals, but it’s much better at helping you reconnect with people in your long ago past. High School, College, etc.
3. Twitter/Business Blogs - In terms of priority these are tied. However, what they each bring to the picture is very different.
4. Plaxo/Myspace - For the professional I think these are fairly irrelevant. Plaxo doesn’t really add any value beyond those listed above (it used to in the past when it was about keeping contact information up to date). As for MySpace it’s maybe not my place to say this since I’m not even on it, but I don’t see how it adds value for the professional. Please feel free to comment if you disagree.
5. All others - Beyond these core tools there are probably hundreds of others. The learning curve and critical mass is typically steep enough that unless there is something in a very specific niche that would be helpful to you it’s probably not worth your time to explore these. Again, I’m open to suggestion and hope you’ll comment if there are other tools that have been helpful to you.

I encourage you to look beyond this post. I’ve written at least a little bit about most of these tools, especially business blogging (as that’s what you’re reading now) and you can navigate these topics using the categories listed below.

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

Many people have been asking me how they can become the featured member in NetworkInAustin.com’s Weekly Referral Newsletter (not yet a subscriber? Subscribe here).

The answer is really quite simple. The first step is that you must be a member of NetworkInAustin.com. That’s easy enough: Click Here to Join! and right now it’s only $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr.

The second step is not much more difficult. You must find a way to add value to the NIA community. That can be done in any number of ways using your own unique talents and skills. Of course you’ll also need to let me know what you’re up to so I can recognize you.

Right now I’m working hardest to grow the newsletter subscriber base (currently 2,000+), membership in our LinkedIn group, and of course new members.

This week’s featured member, Thom Singer, is a perfect example of how to do this.

Here’s what he did for me after my mentioning these needs to him less than two weeks ago. I also told him that I was looking to grow my number of followers on Twitter. At the time I had just 79 followers, now thanks primarily to Thom’s efforts I have over 120.

thomsinger: Also, Network In Austin (dot) Com also has a new LinkedIn Group. @scottingram is behind this site and is looking to grow it big time!

11 days ago · Reply · View Tweet

 

thomsinger: hey, we did not get my friend @scottingram to 100 followers yet. come on, he is less annoying than many others you follow (like me!)

9 days ago · Reply · View Tweet

 

thomsinger: last week I tried to get @scottingram to 100 followers. He is worth following. Now at 95. #100 gets free copy of my book.

6 days ago · Reply · View Tweet

 

 

This is also a pretty good example of my asking specifically for what I needed in the meeting Thom and I were in. (see my previous post)

 

Obviously Thom showed some serious persistance and dedication to my cause even offering a free copy of his book to my 100th follower. His efforts didn’t stop there either. He also wrote a very nice promotional piece for me on his widely read networking blog: NetworkInAustin on Thom’s Some Assembly Required Blog

What assets do you have that you can leverage to help grow and improve the NetworkInAustin.com community? I’d love to make YOU the next featured member.

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

In my opinion the most important part of networking is giving and adding value to those you’re networking with. If you don’t have a mindset of helping others in your networking efforts then you’re not likely to see a very good return on the investment of your time, money and energy.

You won’t be able to help everyone, but as long as you work hard to make a difference for others those networking deposits will pay dividends back to you.

I can’t quote it directly, but on a recent vacation I read: The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea. In this book it says something like: To give and not expect to receive is unnatural. This is an important networking lesson that even very good networkers frequently forget. I’ll talk more about this book in a future post, but I do recommend it. It’s a nice quick read and breaks down what networking is really about into a very readable fictional story.

Now that you’ve done a great job of giving through your networking efforts it’s time to receive right?

It’s not quite that easy. Most people are not mind readers, and many times if they were to guess what you need based on your title or some other piece of information it might not be what you really wanted.

So ASK for what you need! I know this sounds impossibly simple, but so few people do it. You have to tell people what you’re looking for or there’s no way they can help you get it.

The more specific you can ask the better… "I need to grow my business" or "I’m looking for a job" is not nearly specific enough. The more you can focus in on exactly what you need the more likely somebody will be able to help you find just that.

Just look at the difference:

• "I need to grow my business." or "I’m looking for an introduction to the sales manager of a high-tech startup company based in Austin."
• "I’m looking for a job." or "I’m looking for an HR generalist position with a company that has between 50 and 100 employees."

Aren’t you be in a much better position to help someone who asked the latter questions? Give your networking partners the same opportunity. Ask as specifically as you can and you’re much, much more likely to get what you want.

What do you want? How can you ask specifically for that? Who can you ask that question of right now?

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com

I was hoping to post all of this in the discussion section of the new NetworkInAustin.com group on LinkedIn. Unfortunately I discovered the hard way that there is a 2000 character limit. I’ve moved the content to my blog, but would like everyone with an interest in this topic to post their comments to the discussion on LinkedIn. All are welcome to join the NetworkInAustin.com group on LinkedIn.

First let me say thank you for joining the NetworkInAustin.com group here on LinkedIn. I’m very hopeful that this will be a good venue for us to share meaningful thoughts and ideas.

The most common question I’m asked about NetworkInAustin.com is "When are your events." My answer has always been that we don’t have events. NIA was designed to be the hub of networking in Austin and I thought that if anything there might already be too many events and the last thing we need to do is create another vent. People just need help finding the events that are most appropriate for them. Apparently I’ve been wrong for a long time…

Recently the demand for events for NIA members has been just overwhelming and I think it’s time to give in. Based on all of the feedback it seems that people need to have some type of physical relationship with NIA outside of just the website.

That being the case I want to know how to make these events wildly productive and valuable. Something that you’ll look forward to attending and want to bring all of your friends to because of how useful it is for you.

The feedback I’m looking for is your ideas on how to make this happen. First let me share my own thinking that you can either agree with or shoot holes in and provide your own suggestions. I’m open to it all because these events are really going to be about you, not me.

First I’m thinking of doing a monthly event, and based on the feedback I have heard a breakfast meeting would be most appropriate (One person told me that their liver couldn’t handle another happy hour!)

I don’t want these events to duplicate anything else that’s out there. Otherwise what would be the point?

I hope that most NIA members are on an ongoing quest to become better networkers. So why not have a networking breakfast focused on the who, what, when, where and why of better networking?

Of course we need to have facilitated networking opportunities, but I also think that we can learn about the various facets of networking from the multitude of local experts we have right here in Austin.

What about a 50/50 model for these events? Half of the time will be devoted to some type of facilitated networking. The other half will be a speaker or panel discussing some facet of building a truly powerful professional network.

Here are some of my ideas for topics. In your feedback please let us know which you’re most interested in, least interested in, and feel free to suggest your own topic ideas for areas you and others would be interested in learning more about:

• Networking – the basics
• Advanced Networking – best practices
• Personal Branding
• Social Media
• LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter
• Leadership Development (someone suggested a “taste” of Leadership Austin)
• Selling for the Networker
• Marketing to support Networking
• Public Relations/Working with the Media

It’s also been suggested that we do some level of segmentation in the facilitated networking sessions. Grouping B2B and B2C or doing small group pairings based on probable synergies or other common interests, etc.

That’s it for my own brain dump. What are YOUR thoughts???

Happy Networking!

Scott Ingram

NetworkInAustin.com