Building Community Wherever You Go

Photo by Ted Bratton

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called How much Twitter Input can you Handle? There were a number of people who commented on that post and one of them was Christine Livingston, a new friend from the United Kingdom, who is a Coach for Work Change.

When I woke up this morning, my comment section had a trackback from Christine’s post, The Virtual Office of Selected Colleagues. She had been ill and was commenting how nice it was to get well wishes from her Twitter friends both when she was ill and after she returned.

She linked to my post, remarking that “But being ill made me realise that there are individuals in my network whose unique lights shine out for me more greatly than others: whose blogs I particularly enjoy reading and contributing to; whose tweets I especially look out for because they’re normally interesting or engaging; whose comments I love reading here. It was these people I both heard from when I was ill and/or missed because I wasn’t around to see them.”

She’s getting it that relationships are important for her. Then she asked: How you turn that into profitable online business, I haven’t yet cracked, and if anyone has any golden nuggets on this, I’d love to hear them.

Here’s my answer, Christine (and anyone else who is listening) When we build relationships, people care about us and they wish us well and then when they see a need for our services, they say “Hey, my friend, Christine, can help you with that…”

Let me give you an example — Hurtis Heating & Air’s team is putting in a new furnace for me. I met Jim Hurtis back in 1998 or so when I was creating Spotlight magazine’s content for Coy Sawyer with 89Q. Jim came back and we put together an ad for the publication and we talked. I liked his way of sharing that his faith was important to him and that Christian business principles were important.

Flash forward a few years. Coy invited me to join the Christian Business Leaders Breakfast. Jim Hurtis was at the first session I attended. Our little monthly breakfast group is very important to me. I care about the members and they care about me. Building relationships.

So back last fall when my gas fireplace in my office failed, who was I going to call? Jim Hurtis! Actually, I asked him at a breakfast if they did fireplaces too. The fireplace warms my office and was a great decision. So because our furnace was entering its 18th year and the combined rebates and tax credits made sense for us to invest in the replacement, I called Jim. Do you know that you can’t tell if the new furnace is on or not by the sound? And it is warmer than before. Relationships…

That’s a real life example but I have other connections that I have hired across the country and around the world because I met them on social media and other people have hired me. You build that relationship, just like I did with Jim and people will find that they want to send business your way. It doesn’t matter if you are in the same town or across the ocean. If you can provide a service they need and they know you are a person of integrity that they can trust, they will come.

This is the same concept I teach to job seekers. I often get the glazed look when I talk about the power of social media and networking in general. It comes down to my Hurtis example. You build community wherever you go, in real life, on the phone, on Twitter, on Facebook, through blog comments, through caring about other people. And people remember. Networks need nurturing. So… on your way, go nurture… and come back anytime to tell me your success stories. See you soon!