This blog is written by one of 15 individuals attending the South By Southwest Conference in Austin with the intention to bring back ideas and to reimagine Richland County.
Everyone with professional goals would like to expand their network because the theory is the larger your network, the greater your opportunities.
But, how? Aside from shaking hands while wearing a name tag at a social function, how exactly do you expand your network?
On the first day of the SXSW conference, I attended a session called Reach Out: The Networking Strategy You Need Today with Molly Beck, founder of MessyBun.com. Messy Bun provides a platform for anyone to create a podcast. Molly created Messy Bun after seeing a need for podcasts to become more accessible and was able to do so because she was successful in expanding her network strategically.
Here’s how she did it and her detailed steps you can follow to expand your network:
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Define your professional goals. This step will make it easier and clearer to identify the network you need to create.
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Strategically think who can help you reach your goals and identify that list of people, whether by name “Allie Watson” or by identity “someone in philanthropy.”
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Send one email or social media message every week day to someone on the edge of your network. Think of the edge of your network as “friends of friends” and people who have said, “You should meet so-and-so.” Those are the people to identify on your list.
Molly went on in-detail to explain how to craft a message to those on the edge of your network to increase your chance of receiving a response. She explained the response rate difference between acquaintances (approximately 80 percent), people you’ve met in passing (60 percent) and strangers you reach out to with no personal connection (25 percent).
In Mansfield, we don’t quite have the network Molly does after working for Hearst, Venmo and Forbes, but we can certainly look around and identify who can help us achieve our goals locally.
Stay tuned and follow the progress via #SXSW419. Or watch for more blogs starting Saturday, March 10 at richlandsource.com/rising_from_rust/sxsw.
