Tag: advice you didn’t ask for

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Do the Work. Always Do The Work.

Finish Line

I read this story last summer, and I didn’t fully understand it. I loved it, and I bookmarked it, and I read it a half-dozen times, but I didn’t really get it.

It was about Bob Bradley, the former coach of the U.S. men’s soccer team. The story was by Luis Bueno, who used to cover Bradley when he was the coach of Chivas USA. And the reporter remembers one thing about Bradley:

The work.

No matter the results on game day, at practice, all Bradley wanted to talk about was the work. Writes Bueno:

It seemed like every time I caught Bob Bradley after a training session, he brought up the work. The work was good, the work was getting better, the work, the work, the work… It was hardly ever about wins and losses, mostly always the work.

And when I read that story for the first time, it only kind of clicked. It had been a long time since I had worked really, really hard. I had gotten lazy. The passion wasn’t really there. I’d become one of those guys that Todd Snider was thinking of when he sang, “Everybody wants the most they can possibly get / For the least they can possibly do.”

And that story about Bob Bradley was one of the ones that got me moving again. I had to wake up in the morning and do the work. To miss a work day? Unacceptable.

But I still didn’t really understand what all that meant. It wasn’t until recently when it fully clicked. I’ve been on a heavy work binge — on Stry, on side projects, on the Belly Challenge, on my personal life. I’ve been putting in the work, and I’ve been filling up my TeuxDeux and crossing it off and filling it up again. Damn if I’m not as happy as I’ve ever been — even though I’m working as hard as I’ve ever worked.

Then I saw this quote by Jay Bilas, the former Duke basketball star and current ESPN commentator. He wrote a fantastic piece on toughness, and this quote absolutely floored me:

“I was a really hard worker in high school and college. But I worked and trained exceptionally hard to make playing easier. I was wrong. I once read that Bob Knight had criticized a player of his by saying, “You just want to be comfortable out there!” Well, that was me, and when I read that, it clicked with me. I needed to work to increase my capacity for work, not to make it easier to play. I needed to work in order to be more productive in my time on the floor. Tough players play so hard that their coaches have to take them out to get rest so they can put them back in. The toughest players don’t pace themselves.”

And there it was: Work begets more work. Until you put in the work, you don’t know how hard you can really go. Only with work can you understand.

So today is a work day. Today, I will do the work.

Will you?

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Before You Sign, Read The Contract. Always Read The Contract.

Contracts
“People change. Circumstances change. Legal documents don’t change.” — Brent Beshore, CEO of AdVentures

At my first job out of college, I was told that I would get health care. Dental, medical — the usual. This sounded good to me, even though I didn’t know what a co-pay was, or a deductible, or anything else related to health care. My boss told me I got health care, so I got health care. That was that.

And about four or five months in, some co-workers were talking about their health care plan, so I decided to ask my boss about my plan. She sounded surprised — We haven’t taken care of this already? — and called in the company’s HR person. And that HR person called our parent company’s HR person.

And that HR person, on speakerphone, told me that I had declined health care.

What now?

The HR person said that an employee of my stature was eligible for health care benefits starting in the third month of employment. I had one month to sign up for health care, and then my window closed. They had sent me an email about it, the HR person said matter-of-factly. The company had a record of me opening the email, so since I had received it, that was as far as the company was legally obligated to go to notify me of my rights.

In fewer words: We did what we had to do. Case closed.

This was my first experience with contracts. I missed a single email, and I missed out on health care. This was not a pleasant first experience with contracts.[1. This is a common experience. Mule Design’s Mike Monteiro has a great talk about working with contracts. It’s called, “Fuck You, Pay Me.” That should give you an idea of how badly things can go when contracts are involved.]

I’ve learned even more about contracts in my time working on Stry. And if there’s only one takeaway from all of my experiences, it’s this: Before you sign your name to any document, read it, review it and understand it. If you have any questions or concerns, ask them before you sign.

I’ve signed contracts the way I agreed to the Terms of Service for iTunes — mindlessly, and as though the other party has my best interests in mind. This is an easy, easy way to get screwed.

When you fail to understand what you’re signing, you’re likely signing away your rights. Once the signature’s there, it’s too late to change anything.

Here’s a real-world example. Apple’s recently released a new platform for selling books electronically. But the iBooks contract isn’t author-friendly. For example:

“The nightmare scenario under this agreement? You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it.

“Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it.”

Somewhere out there, an author is going to agree to this contract, and they’re going to go through that nightmare scenario. They’re going to get totally screwed. It’s not because they’re dumb. It’s because they’re not careful enough to really dig into what they’re signing. That’s because nobody’s ever told them that they have to pay attention to what comes before that dotted line.

But now you know. Before you sign, read the contract. Always read the contract.

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I Cannot Codify Entrepreneurship, And Neither Can You, And Here’s Why.

337.365 - December 3, 2010

There was a point not all that long ago when I was pretty sure I could codify entrepreneurship. I’d heard plenty of stories, and talked to plenty of entrepreneurs, and I was seeing a lot of the same themes repeat. I thought that if I could just ID specific points along the way, I could explain how to master this thing.

Then I discovered that this isn’t a board game. There aren’t logical, sequential steps. There are common themes, but there isn’t any sense to how this works. Entrepreneurship is a cross between a Choose Your Own Adventure book and Mad-Libs — it’s weird, and deeply personal, and subject to both non-sequitors and randomness.

I read this fantastic quote from KissMetrics’ Hiten Shah that reminded me of just why that is. It’s in a post about how to find the right mentors. He writes:

“That’s the thing about mentoring that people need to understand: It’s about the strength of the individual to weather the unrelenting storm that is entrepreneurship, not acquiesce to some rigid timeline of entrepreneurial life milestones.”

Spot on. Entrepreneurship is this mix of all the stuff I love about life — it’s risk, and chance, and success, and failure, and this quest to be unrelentingly awesome — just condensed into something tangible. It’s the venue through which I’ve chosen to explore the world, and nobody’s going to be able to tell me what the right path is, or where the milestones are.

The only path is the one I choose, and the people I surround myself with have to be capable of helping me answer the questions I need to answer along the way. I need to find lots of people who can challenge me, and who I can listen to. But ultimately, they’re not going to be able to tell me if I’m doing this thing the right way.

The only way to figure that out is to do it and see what happens.

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Buy Into Your Own Demise, or Make Things More Awesome. (Your Choice.)

Best Buy

Forbes ran a story on their website this week about Best Buy. The lead paragraph read:

“Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.”

Then it went on to detail numerous problems with Best Buy’s supply chain.

Now, I have a friend who’s about to start a new job this year with Best Buy. She’ll be working with their supply chain. So I sent her the link.

Naturally, she was bummed. She started saying that, well, at least she’d get a nice line on her résumé out of the job. At least she wasn’t really planning on staying there all that long.

And that crushed me. Because it wasn’t too long ago that I was reading headlines like this about my own industry:

“Sometime soon, millions of people may find themselves unwittingly involved in a test that could profoundly change their daily routines, local economies and civic lives.

“They’ll have to figure out how to keep up with City Hall, their neighborhoods and their kids’ schools — as well as store openings, new products and sales — without a 170-year-old staple of daily life: a local newspaper.”

Newspapers and big-box stores: we’re not all that different. So I sent my soon-to-be-working-at-Best-Buy friend back an email. It read:

Hey, I work in journalism. My senior year, I every morning, I went to a site called Paper Cuts to see which newspapers were slashing newsroom jobs that day. I say this all the time: Journalism companies are in love with their own demise. Back then, I was too.

And looking back, I’m horrified. Why glorify your own downfall? We journalists have infinite tools at our disposal. Why not spend more time focusing on making journalism more awesome?

Anyway, I suppose that’s the challenge before you: Either buy into Best Buy’s slow demise, or get working at making everything you touch more awesome.

Time to get into the latter category. I hope my friend at Best Buy will. I hope my friends in journalism will, too.

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Come, and Embrace the Joy Of Time-Shifting and Longreads-Related Metrics, Ye Merry Publishers!

Screenshot of TiVo

In 2002, the company that measures how many people watch television decided to do something experimental: They started measuring how many viewers were watching TV shows via something called TiVo, a personal recording device that had come to market three years earlier.

Nielsen Media Research, the ratings company, had been measuring TV ratings since the 1950s. But their ratings technology only accounted for viewers who were watching shows at the very moment the shows were airing live. If a viewer decided to save a show to his or her TiVo, and then watched the show at a later time, that viewer didn’t count towards the overall ratings for the show.

It’s about this time that ratings for some shows started to decline. TV executives had their suspicions about the declining numbers. They felt their shows were still being watched, but they were being watched via TiVo, and Nielsen wasn’t counting these viewers. As far as the Nielsen ratings were concerned, watching via TiVo was the same as not watching at all.

And since the value of television advertising rises and falls with TV ratings, ignoring actual viewers was costing TV channels money. So they pressured Nielsen to add these TiVo viewers into the overall ratings picture.

This all sounds kind of ridiculous today — I mean, really, how could Nielsen have just ignored these viewers for years? — and that’s because it is ridiculous. Eyeballs are eyeballs. They should all be counted equally, whether they’re seeing a show when it first airs or a week later via TiVo.

It’s also why it should confuse you when I tell you this: News publishers today are making the exact same mistake that Nielsen did a decade ago.

❡❡❡

The world of modern news publishing isn’t all that different from the world of TV. Like TV, publishers rely heavily on advertising to sustain their operations. Put simply, the more readers a news site has, the more money it typically can charge advertisers.

TV ratings center around two main numbers: Rating (the number of TVs watching a show compared to the total number of TV households) and share (the number of TVs watching a show compared to the total number of TVs tuned in at that particular moment).

Online news metrics are slightly different. Three stand out:

-Time spent on a news site
-Pages read per visit to that site
-Unique visitors to the site

All three are important. But all three also fail to accurately measure a vital chunk of their audience.

❡❡❡

About two years ago, a Twitter hashtag kickstarted a small but influential movement for readers. The hashtag was called #longreads, and it promoted interesting stories of 1,500 words or longer. A story of that length might take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to read. Hence, the name #longreads.

The problem is, #longreads disciples don’t always have the time to read these stories at the moment they arrive in an inbox or pass through a Twitter feed. Sometimes, readers need to save a story for later.

It’s not a coincidence that just as #longreads was starting to grow, a handful of sites popped up to serve that very need. These sites enable users to time-shift stories to a time/place when the reader actually has time to read said story.

It’s not a coincidence that these are known as time-shifting tools. That phrase first became popular with the advent of TiVo.

There are three big sites that allow users to time-shift stories: Instapaper, Readability, and ReadItLater. All three take user-saved stories and store them on the site’s own servers. When readers want to read something, they head over to their site of choice (or the site’s app) and search through their queue for something good that they’ve already saved. The reading experience happens there, not on the publisher’s site.

So this is the good news for publishers: A community of avid readers has access to thousands of new stories that they otherwise wouldn’t see, and these readers are reading and sharing these stories. They’re passionate about this type of reading experience. These are the kind of readers who read so much that they need a TiVo-type tool just to hold all that they want to read.

This is the bad news for publishers: Readers are spending an awfully long time reading great stories, but they aren’t doing it on the publisher’s site.

A reader like me might spend half an hour reading a #longreads essay or exposé, but all the publisher sees is the handful of seconds I spent on the story before bookmarking it for later. Some of the most engaged readers are going, essentially, uncounted.

❡❡❡

Which brings me around to some data that ReadItLater — one of the three big time-shifting sites — published last week.

The data was mined, in part, by a guy named Mark Armstrong. It’s no coincidence that Mark was the one who started the #longreads hashtag. (Now, he’s an editorial advisor for ReadItLater.)

The data shows that ReadItLater has some powerful tools for measuring user engagement with a story. They can measure which authors and sites are most popular. They can measure which stories get put most often into the queue, and which stories get read the most once they’re put in the queue. And that’s just what we learned from this first data set. Just wait until ReadItLater really starts digging.

Unfortunately, this is vital data about power users that publishers aren’t factoring into their metrics. These users aren’t being counted in the overall numbers, and we need to start counting them. Core users are just being ignored, simply because their reading experience is happening on a different server.

Don’t underestimate the size of this audience, either. ReadItLater has four million users, and they’re hosting just a fraction of the time-shifting audience.

Right now, in the publishing community, we have opportunity to prove that these sites have the same type of impact on overall numbers that the TiVo did on Nielsen’s TV numbers. We need to start accounting for this time-shifting in our metrics.

If we don’t, we’re just ignoring some of our most engaged users, and we’re costing ourselves money.

❡❡❡

One other thought: The three services I mentioned do essentially the same thing. But not all three will last. There’s a reason that VHS and Betamax didn’t co-exist for a decade; there’s a reason why Foursquare beat out all the other location-based services. The market will pick a winner.

And I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to say that the winner will be the one that:

A.) Helps publishers make money, and
B.) Shares their data with publishers to make content more measurable, and therefore more valuable to advertisers.

The question is, Who within this market will step up to do just that?

❡❡❡

One final quote on the matter:

“Time-shifting will be something more people are really comfortable with. We never know if the technology is going to sizzle or fizzle, but you can’t wait until it takes off before you say, ‘Hey, maybe we should measure this.'”

Yeah, you guessed it: That quote’s from 2002, in an article about Nielsen and the DVR.

But here’s what I’d like to point out: You don’t have to change even a single word from that quote to apply it to today’s time-shifting tools for reading. The call to the action is the same.

Here’s my plea to publishers: It’s time for us to stop ignoring active readers. We’re in the business of telling great stories. We shouldn’t forget about those who love to read them.

Let’s start measuring the true reach of our stories.

[ois skin=”Tools for Reporters”]

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These Are Some Really Smart Thoughts On Leadership in Newsrooms. I Stole Them From Other People, and You Should Steal Them From Me.

I spent the weekend at NewsFoo, this unconference out in Phoenix. It’s a strange affair: The organizers — O’Reilly Media, the Knight Foundation and Google — handpick about 150 people involved in all corners of news, and they throw them in a building together for a weekend. There aren’t any sessions planned out in advance. People just show up, and what happens happens. The thing gets made up as it goes along.[1. In fact, the photo at top is of the official conference schedule that was made up Friday night, a few hours into the event.]

It was a remarkable weekend, and I had to remind myself to look up every once in a while from taking notes to remind myself that, yes, I was in this room, too. It was impossible not to enjoy the energy that everyone seemed to bring to the weekend.

I showed up at NewsFoo hoping to keep my mouth shut and steal some great ideas, but one session got my especially energized: A session about leadership, innovation, and how the two can come into play when merging the worlds of traditional news and startups. I’m not sure exactly what the session was called; Lead, Follow or the Get the Fuck Out of the Way would have been a decent title, I suppose.

But here’s what I heard that I think is worth repeating[2. Everything here is roughly paraphrased, FWIW.]:

The first step to success is defining what success means. What the editorial people think success is is often different from what the revenue people think. It’s tough to chase success if you don’t agree on what it is. — Raju Narisetti

Talk about what you’re really doing with a particular project. When you can’t agree on the size of the opportunity, it’s tough to figure out how big an investment (time/money/people) should be made to seize it. — Gregg Lindahl

When you try to apply old news operation standards to startups — where things are inherently messy — you’re going to struggle. To thrive, traditional operations must be able to tolerate risk. — David Cohn

Use human language when operating within a news organization. Avoid jargon. And when you’re trying to create organization-wide change, start at the top and work down. Once you enable the upper management to think differently, it makes it easier for lower-level employees to want to change. — Julie Starr

Break down points of resistance. Reduce friction. — Miguel Paz

If you’re chasing something really big, then prepare for it to play out slowly. But don’t say that out loud. Once you tell people things are going to happen slowly, then that’s the pace they’ll go. — Raju Narisetti

I especially loved a thing that Javaun Moradi from NPR said. He works with APIs at NPR, and he talked about NPR’s Serendipity Days. These are designated periods when the tech guys at NPR stop everything they’re working on for 48 hours, form teams and work on anything they want. They put up a board in the office and make a list of big problems. And then they get to work at solving them.

You’ve probably heard of similar corporate examples, like Google’s 20 percent time, or maybe FedEx Day.[3. I also recently stumbled upon a web development company that created a side organization to foster and promote these ideas/projects that come from outside the normal workflow.]

But what Javaun said I found especially insightful. He said it’s events like Serendipity Days that help create grassroots serendipity, and that’s where the great stuff happens. Once you empower people to do, they’ll start making/building/breaking things. That’s a huge leap towards change.

And being at NewsFoo this weekend, just bullshitting about ideas and listening to so many smart people, it was tough not to feel like I was in the midst of a pretty amazing weekend proving exactly his point. What happens now is up to us, and damn if that isn’t an empowering feeling.

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I Am 24 Years Old. This Is What I Believe.

I am 24 years old, and I’m going through a period of transition in my life. It’s that time of the year when I start getting all thoughtful about where I am and where I’m going, and at this very moment, I’m stuck in Kansas City Int’l, waiting for a flight home. So I wanted to write this down.

At age 24, there are certain things I’ve come to believe hold true. I know that my beliefs will change. I know that I will change.

But here, at 24, is what I believe:

Try not to regret bad decisions. Just make the best decisions you can with the best information you have.

When you find that you’ve done wrong, and you have a chance to make it right, don’t idle.

Uncertainty breeds opportunity.

Be spontaneous.

Listening is an active process.

So is life. Don’t be passive.

Only the people who show up get to make change. So show up.

Don’t be afraid to fail.

It’s alright to get rejected. Getting rejected means you’re trying.

At 18, you don’t know that you don’t know what you want.

At 24, you know that you don’t know what you want.

Sometimes, you’ve got to do it for the story.

Do something. Be something.

Define your greatness, and then go out and do something about it.

And most of all, this: In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and you make time for both.

I’m just trying to live up to that every day.

———

Those lovely people in the photo at top: My mom and dad.

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Words Of Advice From an “Overnight Success.”

My startup songwriter-in-residence, Todd Snider, has a line that I find myself quoting a lot. It’s from a brilliant little song, titled “Easy Money.” He sings:

Everyone wants the most they can possibly get
For the least they can possibly do

And he couldn’t be more spot on. I meet a lot of people who want to be an overnight success. Problem is, for most of us in the creative/entreprenurial spheres, there’s no such thing.

Don’t believe me? Listen to the Twitter guys.

And here’s more proof. Meet Dave McClure. Out there in Silicon Valley, he’s what Ron Burgundy would call kind of a big deal. He’s worked with startups, invested in startups, immersed himself in startups. His latest extravaganza is called 500 Startups, and they’re a startup accelerator. They bring in a ton of startups — this year, they’ve worked with north of 50 startups. They mentor them, they groom them, they fund them — and then they send them out into the world.

Naturally, people thought this was crazy.

But then I saw this Twitter exchange tonight between McClure and Jason Cohen, an entrepreneur and investor who runs a popular startup blog:

Amen, guys. They speak to a simple truth: Want to make change? It can happen — one day at a time, one relationship at a time.

Things happen slowly. Success has to be earned. Trust has to be earned.

It happens: One day at a time. One relationship at a time.

Start there.

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Life Lessons Learned From Three Chicks in an RV.

Every once in a while, I get to meet someone who just knocks me over. Someone doing something inspiring and risky and ambitious and epic. Someone who’s doing something incredible.

And last night, I met three ladies who are traveling America in an RV, doing good deeds and inspiring others to chase big dreams. I couldn’t help but be bowled over by the Girls Gone Moto. They started talking about their stories — how they embraced the fear, how they found a dream to chase — and I started thinking of my own story.

See, I remember when I was leaving San Antonio and headed to Biloxi to start Stry. I remember how terrified I was. I remember thinking that there were a million steps ahead of me. I remember thinking, What if it all works? What if it succeeds? What if it turns into a real business? What if I hire employees? What if people start depending on me? What then?

I’d never done any of that, and it all seemed overwhelming. The thought of success seemed overwhelming. So I let the fear in a little bit, and then the questions started changing. I stopped thinking about all the baby steps ahead of me, and started thinking, Well, what if I can’t do this? What if I shouldn’t?

But I know now: There’s a part of the brain that loves to sabotage dreams. It’s the naysayer within your subconscious. And I know now: Sometimes, you have to embrace that fear and blow right past it.

I did, and I can’t begin to describe the sensation of knocking fear back on its ass. It’s an amazing feeling.

And no, the fear doesn’t ever just go away. But once you’ve conquered it once, you’ll always know that you can conquer it again.

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The Secret to Networking. (Hint: It’s not really so secret).

Phone Me

Up front, I should say: I am not a great networker. Not yet. This goes back a long way, but the short version is: Sometime around the 6th grade, I realized that I was terrifyingly shy. Calling a friend to ask, “Hey, you wanna play basketball up at school?” was a Herculean ordeal. I remember riding the bus to school and hoping that it’d be late. It wasn’t that I wanted to miss class; I was more afraid of standing around before school with my own friends and trying to contribute to the conversation.

I was really, really shy, and people who know me now find it tough to believe that Dan Oshinsky — the guy who won’t shut up, the guy who won’t use four words where forty will do — was once quiet.

I eventually grew out of my shyness. I learned how to talk to people on the phone. I learned how to shake somebody’s hand and look them in the eye. I learned how to hide my awkwardness in awkward situations.

And the networking skills are coming along. But I’m discovering here at Missouri that the young j-schoolers on campus aren’t master networkers yet. In fact, some of them are rather worried about their networking skills.

They’re convinced that networking is some special skill that some people have and some people don’t. And they’re worried that they don’t have it.

That’s just not true. Everyone can be a great networker. Here’s the problem: Nobody’s ever given these students permission to be great networkers. And they’ve been waiting for permission.

So here’s what I know, guys. It’s four simple steps. Here’s your permission:

1. Show up.

Yes, this is a ‘duh’ kind of thing to say. But here at Mizzou, there are infinite networking opportunities: Meetups, speeches, brown bag lunches, even office hours. The first step is showing up.

The dirty secret is, most students don’t take advantage of opportunities like these. And they’re missing out.

Showing up is half the battle, the idiom goes. It was also, as Aaron Sorkin once wrote, Napoleon’s battle plan:

Casey: Technically, I have a plan.
Dan: What’s the plan?
Casey: It’s Napoleon’s plan.
Dan: Who’s Napoleon?
Casey: A 19th century French emperor.
Dan: You’re cracking wise with me now?
Casey: Yes.
Dan: Thanks.
Casey: He had a two-part plan.
Dan: What was it?
Casey: First we show up, then we see what happens.
Dan: That was his plan?
Casey: Yeah.
Dan: Against the Russian army?
Casey: Yeah.
Dan: First we show up, then we see what happens.
Casey: Yeah.
Dan: Almost hard to believe he lost.

And yeah, it didn’t work for Napoleon. But he was trying to defeat the Russians.

You’re just trying to make some new contacts in the journalism world.

So show up.

2. Get business cards. Get numbers. Hustle.
If you’re at a busy event — say, a conference — you might get a lot of cards. So on the back of a card, write down something about the person. Something you want to remember about him/her, something you want to follow up on.

And if you’re not comfortable with business cards, use a cool mobile tool like Bump to exchange contact information.

3. Follow up. Buy them coffee. Lunch. No one turns down free food.
I’m not kidding. If a student emails me and asks if they can buy me coffee, I will say yes. If they offer to buy me lunch, I will say yes. I will cancel important meetings and say yes. I have a journalism degree, and people with journalism degrees will do almost anything for free food.

Want access to smart, powerful people? Ask to buy them coffee. Ask to buy them lunch.

They will say yes.

(And here’s a take from an experienced networker: If they’re really busy, offer to bring coffee to their office.)

4. Keep following up.
Send your contacts links. Friend them on Facebook and like their posts from time to time. Tweet at them every few weeks. It doesn’t have to be often. A little thing every so often is just enough to keep you top of mind.

Modern relationships are built one click at a time.

Start clicking.

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