Jeff Rickard

Pinging - All the Time

     If 80 percent of success is, as Woody Allen once said, just showing up, then 80 percent of building relationships is just staying in touch.

     I call it “pinging.”  It’s a quick, casual greeting, and it can be done in any number of creative ways.  Once you develop your own style, you’ll find it easier to stay in touch with more people than you ever dreamed of in less time than you ever imagined.

     Yes, there’s grunt work involved.  Pinging takes effort.  That’s the tough part.  You have to keep pinging and pinging and pinging and never stop.  You have to feed the fire of your network or it will wither or die.

     How many times have you asked yourself, “What’s his face… Ya know, that guy…” Or “I know her, I just can’t remember her name…”  We all face that situation all too often, to my mind.  Every time I hear those statements uttered, I sense a network or community of contacts withering.

These days we are overwhelmed with so much information that our minds can prioritize only the most recent data.  what does it take to break through the white noise of information overload?  Becoming front and center in someone’s mental Rolodex is contingent on one invaluable concept: repetition.

• People you’re contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication - by, say, an e-mail, a phone call, and a face-to-face encounter - before there is substantive recognition.

• Once you have gained some early recognition, you need to nurture a developing relationship with a phone call or e-mail at least once a month.

• If you want to transform a contact into a friend, you need a minimum of two face-to-face meetings out of the office.

• Maintaining a secondary relationship requires two to three pings a year.  

This is an excerpt from Never Eat Alone and other secrets to success, one relationship at a time by Keith Ferrazzi.  Keith also has a blog site that I find very good.

Maintaining and growing your contacts is key to building a referral business.  Giving everyone you meet a business card that highlights only your web site address is a great way to build traffic to your site and also makes you proactive in growing a network.

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