Everyone talks about this nebulous thing called networking. Some of us network without even thinking about it and for others, it is this bizarre concept is one they just can’t figure out. They can’t visualize and they make it way too hard.

I coach all my clients that an effective job search includes networking as a key component. Then I ask them how they view their network right now. Some tell me they don’t have one and others tell me they don’t know what a network is and they are pretty sure they don’t have one.

To help those of you who think you don’t have a network to visualize how one works, let’s examine a multi-layered example with little to do with job search to illustrate networking and perhaps spark some possibilities for you.

A Networking Story

Background: Regular readers and people who know me from Facebook or Twitter know that we now have Buddy, a German Shepherd puppy living with us. Buddy is now 7 months and 3 weeks old. He will be 8 months on December 16. He has been part of our family since August 20 when he was 4 months old. He is our second German Shepherd. Our first, Teddy, died on January 28 suddenly of liver cancer. Teddy was not quite 7 years old when he died.

Teddy had ear problems from puppy onward. We took him frequently to the vet but since he was our first dog ever and everything was new to us and the infection was fairly bad, he seemed to never be able to kick it. At the time, my office was downstairs and Teddy was upstairs. Since I did then and still see clients in person, I had a client who wore multiple hats but was a dog trainer at one point. We talked about Teddy’s ear problems and she met him, examined him, and offered her recommendations. She told me to switch vets and go to Rockwood Pet Hospital in Merrill, WI (a drive about 20 minutes away). She told me to call for an appointment and say this: “He has an ear infection. He is head-sensitive. A dog trainer says he needs to be given anesthesia and then have his ears flushed.”

Rockwood Vet Hospital and their staff then became our regular vet. It took multiple ear flushing (all under anesthesia) before we cured Teddy’s infection. But their expertise was apparent and it was also apparent how much they cared for both the pets and the pet owners. It felt like being part of a family.

Fast forward to Buddy. We took Buddy to Rockwood when he was with us for 5 days so we would have their guidance from the beginning. They gave him the new puppy examine and answered my list of questions plus gave us a kit with all kinds of puppy information in it. They also recommended a trainer, Cindy Steinke, K-9 Elementary.

We never used a trainer with Teddy. But for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that my office is now upstairs and Buddy meets all my clients, we felt it was a good idea to at least inquire about a trainer. Buddy is a busy puppy and at the time I called Cindy the first time, he was stealing (and chewing) socks and shoes and other items. Cindy had a great package of four sessions and I knew in the first session that we were going to make progress. Suffice it to say, I had let Buddy become the leader instead of me. Not a good idea with a German Shepherd. However, I learned strategies and commands that really helped with everyday problems.

We discussed with Cindy the issue about tie-outs and whether she thought an electric fence would be better. Teddy was on a tie-out and then later was trained to the yard. But the leash law changed and I really didn’t trust Buddy. Teddy also had to be watched closely until he was three because he did run if unwatched.

Buddy had already broken a tie-out. We contemplated and researched. I called Dawn Bugni, fellow resume writer from North Carolina and more importantly ardent pet lover and former owner of a pet sitting business. Dawn has her four acres enclosed for her five dogs and myriad of other pets with an electric fence.

After talking with Dawn, I asked Cindy for her recommendation at our next appointment. She recommended Brad at Pet Stop. I called Brad and asked him to stop by and explain his products. Long story short, we now have a Pet Stop Fence and Buddy can enjoy the backyard without me having to worry about him running away.

Let’s summarize this networking story:

1. Client and dog trainer recommended Rockwood Pet Hospital
2. Rockwood Pet Hospital recommended Cindy Steinke from K-9 Elementary
3. Cindy Steinke recommended Brad from Pet Stop.
4. I consulted with Dawn Bugni to make sure I was making a right decision on the fence.

What is networking?

Of all of the above people, the only direct personal connection I had was with Dawn. Dawn and I are friends who talk all the time. I knew my client because it was her second or third visit to Design Resumes but I had never heard of Rockwood, K-9 Elementary, or Pet Stop. I never saw traditional advertising on any of them. Yet the trust I had with one led to the connection with the next one.

Networking is simply connecting with people and resources which connects you to more people and resources. Most people make networking too hard. Yet if you work at networking, you will never fail a problem too big for you. You can’t have all the answers but as you let one connection lead you to the next, you will find yourself surrounded with reliable, dependable resources and people to solve anything you have to deal with in your career, life, or business.

image by Tomas Sobek

When I first started on LinkedIn, I followed the original directions very tightly. I only connected with people I knew well. After all, those were the guidelines. But as my network grew and time went on that changed.

Last night, I was reading a conversation thread on Career Director International’s e-list. Someone had asked about how people felt when people sent invitations without a clear connection and worse yet used the traditional LinkedIn invite: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

The story of me starting on LinkedIn, my very first social network, is here. When Olympic Slalom Coach Bob Campbell sent me my very first invite it was the standard greeting but I wasn’t going to turn him down. Nor when Olympic Gold medal winner Joe Jacobi invited me with the standard greeting of “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” did I turn him down. Bob and Joe were friends and so I did know who I was connecting with but they used the standard greeting. I remember replying, “I don’t know what LinkedIn is but sure.”

My relationship with Joe actually grew much stronger because of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and loving social media networking. Joe’s in charge of USA Canoe/Kayak now, a role that I was excited to see him take on. He has used social media effectively to grow that organization too. I bet he still connects willingly with new people.

What is LinkedIn for?

While I was contemplating and reminiscing, Laura Smith-Proulx, an esteemed and respected colleague, vocalized what I was thinking. She said, “I’m always surprised when others say they won’t connect with someone they don’t know. How else do you expand your professional network or promote your business? What else is LinkedIn for?”

Exactly! I have had many people that I didn’t know at all connect with me on LinkedIn and other platforms. I can’t read their minds and I don’t know why they want to connect but I can tell you that I have landed clients from new LinkedIn connections that I know I would never have connected with without LinkedIn. I see it as an opportunity for them to get to know me and see if working with me makes sense. I both have my blog linked to my profile and I post blog posts as status updates on LinkedIn so being connected to me allows them to access my information directly.

The Standard LinkedIn Invite

Though I coach my clients to build effective invitations that are personalized to help them connect with people, I understand why people don’t always use the personalized version.

1. There are some places on LinkedIn like this screen on the left above. If you enter e-mail addresses here, you will end up sending the standard invite and it moves so fast that I can’t find the personalization option.
2. Some of us have been on social media for so long (well, in terms of a long time in social media worlds) and we don’t remember what it was like to be a newbie. We complain about people not personalizing their invites but honestly maybe no one ever told them the rules.

Set your own rules!

Lighten up, people! You can set your own rules. I do connect with people I don’t know because I don’t know where my next client will come from. Working with people from throughout the world, LinkedIn is a great tool to help people find me and trust me.

I wrote a LinkedIn profile for someone who connected with me and then asked me to write his profile. He was in Saudi Arabia. Just like with my other clients, we connected, then we set an appointment and used Skype to write the profile in real time. But if I had said no to his invite, would I have worked with him at all? Probably not.

I also connect with colleagues. It makes no sense to me to avoid connections with colleagues and many of my colleagues have become my friends precisely because we talk or connect on social media. I think often people fear connecting with those in the same business because they think they will lose their slice of the pie. I find that my clients choose my services because of the connections we build and my colleagues add value to my life through the information they share and the friendship we exchange.

Everyone will have different perspectives but since I am building a business one client at a time, I welcome new connections. I love the ripple-effect!

Photo by Luca Venturi Oslo

I’ve been in business as Design Resumes for a long time. I’ve lived in Wausau, Wisconsin even longer. But until Sunday, for many people in Wausau, I was invisible.

Now for those of you who read this blog regularly or know me from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or the many blogs I visit and comment on, I am anything but invisible! But when the story ran in in the Wausau Daily Herald and dominated both the front and the back page, I became visible in my own hometown.

All time records

Sunday set an all time record for this blog and Monday, I booked 5 new clients and answered 5 more email inquiries. The first new client came in last night and she is a nontraditional student at one of the local colleges. When she mentioned was going to have her resume written, the head of the learning center asked who she was going to see.

My new client replied that she was going to Design Resumes to see me and the other individual asked, “oh, is she the one on the cover of the newspaper?” When my client said yes, this person replied, “we cut out the article so we can post  it and recommend that our students consider using her services.”

Funny thing is, I have taught resume seminars at this college for 9 years and written resumes for both former students and management! Still, to most of the college and the surrounding community, I was invisible.

In the last year, my business expanded nationally and even globally with a strong reach via this blog and my social media presence. I can share job seeker success stories from clients throughout the United States and the world. My clients in Greece are now in new positions in Barcelona. But I was still invisible to most people here in Wausau.

Invisible job seekers

Job seekers are often invisible too. Despite a strong blog presence, people who didn’t use social media or Google didn’t see me. Many job seekers, even those who chose to have a professional write their resume and it overflowed with accomplishments and keywords, still stay invisible!

Why? They are assuming that they are visible when they use the only the online job boards to apply for positions. Unlike my invisibility caused more by people who didn’t know Wausau had a professional resume writer because they never Googled, these job seekers are hidden in the sheer volume of resumes sent to employers. They had an outstanding resume, perhaps, but no one could see it.

How to become visible

Job seekers who found me previously often came from Google and from referrals or networking contacts. A job seeker needs to commandeer their networks to increase their visibility. How?

• Start by building a network before you need it. Harvey MacKay in his popular book, Dig your well before you are thirsty, advocates:

A network replaces the weakness of the individual with the strength of the group. The idea of the group is to benefit members who have the same race, religion, gender preferences, ethnic background, business, trade and professional interests, economic interests, or personal interests. They are the basic building blocks of any networking system.

• If you think you need to wait until you need a network, you will not be able to successfully build one quickly. But if you have waited too long, you can still gain ground by making an effort to network correctly. MacKay also says:

A network can make you look good. To keep your network up and running, freshen up each entry at least once every six months.

• Work your way into a company through the back door, find out who you know either in the company, or who you know who knows someone in the company. This could be a college alumni, your next door neighbor, your fellow board member in an organization, or your hunting buddy. You don’t know if you don’t ask.
• When you find that answer, it is time to schedule an informational interview. Contact your desired individual and offer to buy lunch or coffee. Your goal is to gather information. You should always have your resume with you but it is not your goal to hand off your resume in the informational interview. If the individual is too busy to meet with you or on the other side of the country, ask if you can schedule a 10 to 15 minute phone conversation. If you get a yes, keep your word when you make the call, plan ahead what you will say so you can be clear what you are asking. Tell them you appreciate their time and if they have any leads for you, please  let you know. Send them a thank you (hand-written is a nice touch).
• Armed with your new information, make the contact in the company and get your resume to that person, letting them know that John Smith suggested that you might be a great solution for the issues that the company is facing. Be sure you ask John Smith for permission to use his name before you do this.

Before you know it, you will be celebrating your successful job search and you will no longer be fighting invisibility. Invisibility is never fun. But the good thing, is that it can be removed and when you remove that invisibility cloak, your talents and accomplishments will take you to the next level in your career.

Photo by sammydavisdog

We have more tools than ever before in history to communicate our value and connect with others. But we don’t always use them correctly and that can have disastrous results to our job search or business marketing strategy.

Consequences of using wrongly social media in the job search

1. I asked: Could these 3 Facebook No-Nos make you lose your job?
2. One of my most popular posts asks: Jobseeker, are you invoking the law of Subtraction?
3. And in Have you Googled Yourself Lately? I remind you that employers do.
4. And we touched on it in 5 Reasons to Check your Attitude.

Red Riding Hood had her own issues with wolves but the boy who cried wolf is what I want to talk about today. What happens to your own well-cultivated network when you “cry wolf?” In the story of the Boy who cried wolf, people stop believing him. He initially thought it was fun to get the villagers all excited and have them come running when he cried wolf but the end result was that when a real wolf attacked the flock, he was left to try to defend the flock of sheep by himself because they didn’t believe him.

Using Facebook as a text messenger

Some people tend to use Facebook as a text messenger, letting their whole network know whenever they need help with something. The difference is that Facebook stays there unless you hit delete to your posts and even then you don’t know how many people read whatever you said or complained about before it was deleted.

Mobile phones make it easier to post on Facebook when you are overtired or perhaps have been drinking. You may not realize the impact your chronic complaints or pleas for help have on your network.

Carry this through to Twitter and other social media and you start hurting your credibility and reduce the desire your connections may have to help you.  Your goal in using social media in your job search (and all of this also applies to entrepreneurs and those fully employed) is to build positive networks willing to help you if you need help.

The turnabout is, of course, also true. You need to willing to help others when they have needs. But assuming you already get the concept of nurturing a network and cultivating it by sowing seeds of helpfulness, then you need to also be careful of whining in public, labeling groups of people, calling people out, or in general, continually looking negative in your status updates.

Make some changes in how you update your status

Take a moment today and look at what you said in your stream recently. Start by deleting anything you wish you hadn’t said and then resolve to think before you post, tweet, or blog.