Set yourself up for success and keep your network warm so during rainy days, you will be able to reach out for support. From current and past colleagues, to individuals in associations, you have a ton of people in your network, you may just not have thought about them until you needed to. We can find ourselves in situations we never imagined, so building and organizing your network will have positive benefits allowing you to leverage a sea of warm and cool connections to potentially lead to new, exciting opportunities.
{ LinkedIn + Facebook }
Since we cannot attend networking events in-person with the current social distancing guidelines, then social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are useful tools for you to use to build and maintain your networks. When on LinkedIn, you can click “My Network” to view people you may know from the companies you listed you worked for, the schools you attended, places you volunteered, as well as people in your same industry and similar roles. You can also create a group and add people to it that share similar interests and roles. This is a great way to keep your networks engaged and organized.
{ Warm + Cool Connections }
Another opportunity for organizing your network is to list connections as warm or cool prospects by looking at the strength of each connection in order to determine which they are. This is a great way to see who your low-hanging fruit is, and then continue strengthening those relationships. It also gives insight as to who you need to a build a stronger connection with depending on your needs and wants at the time. By organizing your network, you may begin to see a lack of needed associates that you can then focus on building strong and collaborative connections, so set solid goals for what you wish to attain.
{ Consolidate + Label }
We have an umpteen amount of contacts stored in our phone, email (many of us have multiple email addresses), Rolodex of business cards, and all the social platforms we’re connected with. It is super helpful to consolidate all your contacts into one document and organize them into categories in the document for when you need to do some outreach to your network. You will know who the best is to contact for what if things are labeled correctly. It’s time consuming and unproductive to search through all your tools to find someone’s contact information, when you can save time and have everything stored safely and neatly in one place. And lastly, save as you go! Set yourself up to achieve and turn on “auto-save” so that you never lose any work, or even better, connect it to your Cloud so you can access the information from anywhere and on any device that has Internet capabilities.