I recently had a conversation with someone whom I have a lot of time for and consider a friend who has been struggling to get a return from their business connections in many environments including on-line social networks such as Ecademy.
They feel that they have been giving without seeing a fair return and that the investment of time was too much. They were giving up on things and rueing the waste of time over the past few months.
I asked them if I could speak candidly about my experience, which was the same as theirs initially – They give and keep giving and get what can only be described as sprats, and poor quality ones, in return.
I tracked things for a while and spoke to lots of people about the referrals they had given others and the nature of their relationship with them. There was a strong corollary between the length of time they had been investing in the relationship and the quality of the referrals passed. Very few really good referrals passed between people who didn’t know and like each other, and although I had been giving referrals to people I didn’t know that well in order to kick start the reciprocity, it didn’t work. I found that I was the exception, I wasn’t the rule.
When I looked at who I did receive referrals from I realised that I had known them for some time, usually at least a couple of years and I spoke to them often, socialised and gave them help when they needed it. They were friends not contacts. This is not about casually commercialising friendships but is about learning how friends can support each other and facilitating that for mutual benefit. It’s just what friends do for each other.
Then I compared my referrals from 18 to 30 months ago with the referrals I received in the last 12 months and the value was similar. This comparison held true for each of the networks I had been active in. Unfortunately for some networks I’d ‘given up’ before that 18 months had passed, and let a lot of good work slip away. What a pity.
A lot of people say they don’t have a lot of time to invest in the networks, but when you turn that round, we all want people to invest time in us when we are active in that network, why should they do that if we are time poor and choose to spend it elsewhere. It’s really up to us to decide what we need and then truly understand the process and effort that is required to deliver it, then making the decision about what that means and what we can do.
Sometimes when you make an investment you have to give it time to mature and I think in social networks that’s critical, but it’s also important to be consistent and businesslike, none of this works if you create an impression of being unprofessional, to be referred you have to be referable, and that’s as important in the places where you are having fun as those in which you do business, because others cannot see the context you are in, they view your interactions in their context.
I set targets for how many referrals I will give each year, because I control that, but really I am setting the target for the referrals I will receive in the 12 months starting in about 18 months time.
