I got sucked into Chris Broganville recently, reading a bunch of his posts, and posts from others about him.
One that stuck out was his post titled COMMUNITY ONLY MEANS SOMETHING IF YOU KEEP IT WARM
He talks about relationships he’s had with the biggies… Dan Heath, who he had a warm relationship with, and who he thought he could pick things up with.
Contrast that with other biggies who he hasn’t maintained a relationship with, including Keith Ferrazzi and Tom Peters.
Chris runs with the big dogs… he knows some serious people, and they know him. But he’s not talking about knowing them from 30 years ago, or just dropping their name once… he is talking about THE STRENGTH OF THE RELATIONSHIP.
In JibberJobber there is a in important function that you should be using: ranking/stars.
When you put someone in JibberJobber you should rank them. On the image on the right you’ll see the stars… you can change them on various pages, but the point is to monitor or measure the relationships you have with individuals.
Meet someone at a networking event the night before? If you don’t think you have anything in common, or a reason to pursue the relationship, then don’t give them any stars (leave it blank). If you think there is something there, though, and you want to pursue a professional relationship, rank them as a 2 or 3 Star.
As you develop the relationship, increase the ranking to 3 and 4 and 5 Stars.
If I rank you as a 5 Star, that means I think we have an awesome relationship… perhaps you’ll interrupt a meeting to take my call, or at least you’ll respond as soon as you can when the meeting is done.
In JibberJobber I can track how STRONG my relationships are, not just how BIG my network is.
Are you doing this?
I think many are disillusioned by those who say “my network is THIS BIG!!”
Really?
How many of those contacts will actually respond to what you have to say? How many care about you, or will help you?
Go read Chris Brogan’s post, to get a sense of where you want to be with your professional relationships… and then jump over to your JibberJobber account and make sure you are using stars to rank the strength of the relationships.