How to Nurture Your Powerful Personal Network

In my last blog I wrote about how to build a powerful personal network. I'm guessing you now know who your most powerful contacts are, so how do you go about keeping them, and benefiting from their special personal traits?

You probably don't need reminding that relationships only exist when something happens between people. So if your key contacts are not necessarily people you see every day, how do you maintain a useful contact without artificially creating conversations.

It is really easy.

First of all, don't forget these people are the sort you will probably enjoy contact with or certainly benefit from, so time invested will reap a return almost immediately. So how do you make best use of your own valuable time on your network?

Get Your Five A Day

There are probably about twenty or thirty key people in your powerful network. Aim to have some sort of contact with five of them each day. That way you will probably be able to keep in touch with all of them each week.

Sounds a lot? It shouldn't because contact can be anything from a phone call to a two line email.

The point is that by the simplest of contacts they know you were thinking of them in some useful context.

I Saw This And Thought Of You

Remember the Post Office advertisement with the strap line 'I saw this and thought of you'? In the ad someone was surprised and delighted by a card or letter in the post from a friend (or contact) who had thought of them - a really effective campaign based on the simple pleasure of knowing someone was thinking about you.

Next time you come across an interesting on-line article, news story or piece of research, pause for a moment and ask yourself 'who else would be interested in this?' if the answer is someone in your powerful network, send it them!

Simple.

Share the Social Media Love

Social media can be a curse or a blessing. If you can resist the time-thief temptations of Facebook games (Note: there are also many other equally good ways of wasting your time on-line) social media can make the job of showing your contacts you are interested in them and like their work a simple one.

Your contacts probably have similar interests as you - do they have blogs? Or do they use Twitter or Digg? You can invest time effectively by keeping up to date with their work, but also making sure they know you value their opinions by commenting on blogs, re-tweeting their work or using 'like' functions on Digg or Facebook.

Told you it was easy.

Finally you might be at the start of a project where you need the help of your power network contacts to get your idea out there. My advice is to start early by arousing their interest - ask their opinion, let them engage with your ideas, they won't be able to help themselves once they get interested, it's in their nature (remember why you identified them as powerful people in your network?). To use an old-fashioned phrase, court them, they will repay you.

One final thing - the idea of networking is not manipulation and exploitation, people soon see through that. You are good at what you do so be prepared to share and be a part of someone else's powerful network. Don't make networking all for your benefit - people who court you might have less to give in return but the nature of networks is that ideas, power and influence circulates for good.

Be a generous networker.

How To Build a Powerful Personal Network

It's probably a sign of the times, but increasingly people I coach are concerned about making sure they are match fit to compete in the jobs market. High on the list of the skills they want to sharpen is networking. Here's an exercise I devised to build and maintain a powerful personal network.

What networks do you already use?

Make lists of people already in networks you have. Divide them in to the following categories - some people may be in more than one:

- Social/family
This shouldn't be too hard, these are the few people who matter for more than just work or business.

- Professional/Peers
These are the people you do business with regularly - some might be competitors who you need to keep an eye on, others may be peers whose opinions you value or who you just have to work with.

- Experts/artisans
These are people you need for their particular knowledge or skills. They may not be at the same organisational level as you but they are valuable.

Next list the people you know in the following categories (they are based on Malcolm Gladwell's superb book The Tipping Point), again some of these people will be in the groups you listed above:

Connectors:

People who know everyone. They are the ones who constantly introduce people to each other and know exactly who is the right person to see about everything.

Maverns:

Some of the people in your experts and Artisans list may be Maverns.They are specialists, and are madly passionate about their subject. They're evangelical and eager to share their love of their topic with you. You probably know Maverns on a range of subjects.

Salespeople:

exactly what it says on the tin. Salespeople are great convincers and influencers, the ones with the power to get an idea across.

By now you'll have quite a few names, probably too many to keep in regular contact with all the time. So, how do you work out which of these people are your most useful contacts?

Review your lists and see whose names appear most across the categories. You will probably end up with a list of about twenty or so.These are your power networkers and are the people you want to have around you for whatever project you embark on.

In my next post we'll look at how you nurture and maintain your power network. In the meantime get hold of a copy of Gladwell's Tipping Point, for a great account of how only a few people can make a whole host of difference.