The digital networking scene is booming. So is a growing lack of respect for common people skills and decency. I discuss the case for bringing them back through face-to-face networking with my guest, Brian Wallace. Brian is Founder of NowSourcing, an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world's ideas simple, visual, and influential. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present, joined the SXSW Advisory Board in 2019-present and became an SMB Advisor for Lexmark in 2023. He is the Co-Founder for The Innovate Summit which launched in May 2024. We’ve gotten used to interacting in a digital landscape, including video conferencing most of the time. As we get further towards the edge of a proverbial cliff, assuming AI is going to make everything better and we have the totality of everything on the phones in our pockets, what do we do to avoid falling? We can perfect our sales pitches on LinkedIn and elevator pitches on Zoom, and it’s still not nearly as impactful as face-to-face networking. Getting Back to Being Human in Business Networking Situations What people need to understand is, we need to stop running away from humanity and trying to do everything at scale in a virtual world. We need to get more personal again instead of just building new connections on LinkedIn like a video game. Think about it… when is the last time you checked in on somebody you’ve known for a couple of years but haven’t spoken to recently and set up an in-person meeting? Brian says he can guarantee that everybody right now has a ton of missed messages they’re sifting through because they were focused on playing the LinkedIn game for so long. In person interactions have taken a big hit. We’ve forgotten how to make eye contact, we’ve forgotten how to shake hands, we’ve forgotten how to be human. The world needs to get better at being human again. When it comes to networking in general, more so for in person networking, we need to stop selling everybody, stop coming up with canned sales pitches, and start connecting meaningfully again. At the end of the day meaningful relationships are paramount to your success (or failure) in the business world. Brian believes the main thing to remember about face-to-face networking is to figure out how to be the most interesting person in the room or at least the most interesting version of yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to brag, grandstand, or be over-the-top energetically if you’re normally introverted. It just means that instead of asking meaningless questions about the weather, come up with better stuff and ask more meaningful questions that yield more meaningful answers and interactions. We don’t need dumb party tricks instead of connecting as humans, and that is what is wrong with the networking world. What NOT to do in Face-to-Face Networking Situations Let’s start by unpacking the word “networking”. Brian believes there’s a lot of misuse of the word, and that means developing the understanding of and behind that word. Because a lot of people depending on your personality type, how you show up in business, if you’re introverted or extroverted, in sales or a different career, “networking” means different things to different people. So, let’s just examine the networking event game. When you’re at any kind of conference, meetup, or event where part of the agenda is networking there are many misconceptions. So, what do we automatically think? We better come armed to the teeth with a fancy suit and a bunch of business cards. We’re just doing the business version of speed dating. We run around in this horrible, cutthroat way, and we’re just focused on sales and transactions instead of trying to make a good impression. But the truth is that people buy, people interact, people engage with the people that they know, like, and trust. It’s not rocket science. But it can seem that way if you have the wrong approach.
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