Moving On...

The Pay it Forward Chronicles has been a blogpost blog for a little over a year now.

Thanks to the AMAZING help from my good friend Greg Hyer, I have been able to start a new website - www.chuckhester.com (also available at www.theypayitforwardchronicles.com )

Please come visit me there. The book excerpts along with other information - including upcoming announcements on how to buy my forthcoming book - will be available at this site.

See you at www.chuckhester.com !

Chapter 3 Excerpt - Treat Your Connections Like They're Standing Right in Front of You

Chapter 3 – Treat Them Like Their Right in Front of You - Online social media etiquette

Here’s the scenario: A person contacts you and would like to get to know you better, on a business level. You agree and start a conversation. As the relationship develops you find that you have more things in common than you originally thought. You want to deepen the relationship. You look for ways to help this other person and become good friends. Oh, and by the way, you’ve never actually physically met.

Welcome to the world of online networking. For this old-fashioned guy, it took a while to get used to meeting and talking to folks for months, sometimes years that I never actually met. Until I decide to apply a very important principal to my online relationships:

Treat your connections like they’re standing right in front of you.

By using your inherent sense of respect for others, you can develop some amazing relationships online.

Here’s a few tips to help you can treat your connections like they’re standing right in front of you:

1. Be open to new relationships. I often get invitations on LinkedIn from people I have nothing in common with – an IT administrator, a blogging mom in New Hampshire – and for the most part I always accept those invitations. Why? Because I never know what may come out of that relationship in the long run.

2. Be polite but be honest. Respond back to invitations honestly. IF you don’t want to pursue the relationship, then say so.

3. Be yourself and be who you are, not who you want other to think you are. Don’t put on an online “identity” to impress or try and influence.

4. Remember the other person is real – not just a computer connection. Respond in a reasonable time, don’t ignore them and be sure to follow through on anything you commit to do.

5. Listen, don’t just talk. Listening is an art not easily mastered, especially in the white noise world of online networking!

6. Finally, look for ways to develop an online relationship into a physical one. Like the person you’re connected to – either as a friend or business associate? Then take the time to meet them if you can. Make the face to face connection.
   

So, my question to you is simple: Who are you connected to online that you don’t know well but who may make a difference in your life? More importantly, who are you connected to online that you can make a difference in THEIR lives?

Linking In to Pay it Forward - Chapter 2 Excerpt

As promised, I am posting excerpts from my new book, LinkingIn to Pay it Forward - Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media. This Chapter covers personal and professional branding. The whole chapter is NOT below - but the highlights are included. I hope you enjoy. Feedback is DEFINITELY welcome. Please feel free to repost, as long as you include a link back to this site!

Chuck
How important is branding building to your success? Is building your brand a costly proposition? What about tying your company/service into your personal brand – is that suggested, or for that matter wise? I will answer these, and many other questions in this chapter.

While I didn’t start out using LinkedIn and other social media channels to build my own brand (I was looking for a job first and foremost) I did find that as I built up my online presence my brand was being bolstered at the same time.

LinkedIn is, just like other social media sites, first and foremost a community of people. There are real, living and breathing individuals behind the profiles. They have conversations, interact, and rely on the trust that is built up through these interactions.

Can you build a personal brand overnight? Not hardly. It takes time, just like any relationship – business or otherwise – to establish a presence in a community.

My brand has been built over the last 2 years. I have contributed to forums on LinkedIn, posed and answered questions on the Answers section of the site. Connected with people, meeting them online and in person. As daunting as building a brand on LinkedIn may sound, there are a few easy steps to make it happen. The old saying – the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time – comes to mind. Take it slow and follow a few simple steps, and you’ll be on your way!

Be Transparent. Does this mean you talk about your love life or how you yelled at your kid last night because they broke curfew? Hardly! But it does mean simply be yourself. Don’t put on a “persona.” I had a conversation with someone recently about how they were developing what they would portray themselves to be online. Wow! Not someone I want to hang out with! If you aren’t real online, how can I trust you to do business with me in an ethical manner?

Be Part of the Community. Join a group that interests you. Answer questions, and ask them in the Answers section. Invite others to connect with you after reading their profiles and finding commonality. In short, join the conversation!

Practice the Small Good. This theory – a parallel to Pay it Forward – is one of my favorite. If someone comes to you and needs help – and it takes less than 10 minutes to do so, by all means do it! The result is a huge blessing for the person who was stumped and couldn’t find the help he needed. Easy to do, very valuable to receive.

Go into any connection on LinkedIn not expecting to get anything in return. IF you go into a new connection and immediately expect them to be helpful, then that can ruin the trust you are working to establish. If, on the other hand, you go into a new connection with the attitude of how you can help them it will be a richer, deeper relationship.

Always treat your connections like they’re standing right in front of you. While I’ll get more specific in the next chapter about this, I wanted to mention it here because I believe it’s that important. If you go to a business function – say a Chamber business after hours – do you approach new contacts with canned speeches and personas? Do you walk up to them and say, “Hi, I’m Chuck. I work for Acme Life Insurance, want to buy some?” No, you take the time to get to know them, learn about their businesses, perhaps even their families. What’s more you follow up with them after the meeting if you want to build the on the connection and continue to the conversation.

It’s the same with social media. NEVER connect with someone, then turn around and ask for them to recommend you. Take the time to get to know them, find out how you can be of SERVICE to them. It will pay off in the end.

I am a firm believer that the person you connect with is probably not the one that will mean new business for you. It’s that person’s other connections – or even the connections of their connections.

Bottom line on personal and professional branding: be yourself, be a resource, build trust and treat your online connections like their real – they are!

Linking In to Pay it Forward - An Excerpt

As promised the following is an excerpt from my new book, Linking in To Pay it Forward - Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media.

I hope to finish this by the end of the month, so stay tuned. I am also committing as a goal to blog twice a week on the subject and include excerpts as I go.

Feedback is definitely welcome as is tweets, posts on blogs and trackbacks!

Introduction – This is NOT Your Daddy’s Business Book

I have been in high tech public relations since 1984, working for everyone from Western Digital to TEAC to the Department of Defense Technology Transfer Program to my best and current job as Communications Direct for iContact Corporation.

That’s 28 years of booms and busts, fads and favorites, the “new” Mac, Yahoo, and that small upstart called Google. Throughout those 28 years, one thing has stayed constant for me – I always had an affinity for connecting with other people.

Before online networking, I was known for my ability to find someone, get answer to a question, all within three phone calls.

I was always told I was good with people, could talk to anyone and later that I “never met a microphone I didn’t like.” So, when the Internet took hold for good, and being online was the way to go, I felt that social networking was made just for me.

At first it was a way to connect online, with reservations. There were things that this corporate/agency raised professional didn’t like. Tell them your intimate details? Meet people online anywhere anytime in anyplace? But they aren’t standing in front of you, how can that work well?

But slowly I became accustom to this new business tool. There was LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, even Yahoo Groups. All had their plusses, and many had their minuses.

It wasn’t until I joined iContact in July of 2006 that I realized the power of social media – and online networking - and how important it would become in my life.

As iContact’s first PR Director, I was charged with building a Social Media plan, reaching out to bloggers and making our company known in the online community. It was a process where I learned as I went, but I drew on my strength of being able to connect to people. It made all the difference in the world.

Through social networking, I have developed friendships that will last a lifetime, found partners and business for iContact and garnered media coverage in major media outlets – both on and off-line. This includes the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Fast Company.com

I have refinanced my house using a broker I found, connected friends with key executives of companies that I wanted to reach. I have received offers to speak at conferences, and my wife has even found the right shoes to wear when conducting Team Building seminars!

Maybe just as important, I have built a business, a personal brand that is recognized throughout the U.S. and continue to reach others outside of the United States.

Oh, and one other detail – I met my CEO, Ryan Allis, and got my job as a direct result of Linking in with him.

All from one website – LinkedIn.

Over the past 2 ½ years I have slowly grown my LinkedIn network to where it stands today – more than 8000 direct connections in every state in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, Canada and South America.

To put that in perspective, I have the ability to directly reach more than 8000 people in companies ranging from IBM to Microsoft to Starbucks. With LinkedIn I can email them directly or even message them through the application.

With this tremendous network I can now reach out to practically anywhere in the world, to almost any industry. When I travel I always enjoy the company of my LinkedIn connections. I have been able to assist in getting jobs for more than 30 people to date through LinkedIn Live Raleigh – an in-person LinkedIn networking event I started in July, 2007.

I truly believe LinkedIn is the best way to network online – and to Pay it Forward.

Again, more about that and other topics surrounding my passion later in this book.

First, as the chapter title implies, this is NOT your Daddy’s business book. I’m not going to give you a serious of exercises to make you a better networker. Nor am I going to run you through a step-by-step process on how to use LinkedIn as a web application.

There are plenty of good websites and books – all listed in the Resources section – that can do that as well, if not better than I. Jason Alba’s I’m on LinkedIn Now What is my best example. More on Jason, later.

No, this is more of a “let’s sit down and talk” story. A way to help you realize the power of Linking in and Paying it Forward by hearing from me and a host of others about how we made it happen.

I will also share with you how once I started asking “how can I be of service to you,” instead of wanting to know “what can you do for me,” when I connected with people on LinkedIn, the value proposition of social media changed for me – for the better.

My hope is that you will come away from this inspired, hungry for more information and ready to enrich your life and the lives of others through social networking.

Another thing this book is not – long and drawn out. My good friend, Rich Sloan, who was one of the many that pushed me to write this book, said I should use the Seth Godin model of less is more. Nuggets instead of full course meals. I couldn’t agree more.

What this book is, on the other hand, is a chance for me to share the blessings that I have enjoyed using LinkedIn, and hopefully touching a few people along the way.

One more thing, many people I connect with ask me if my Pay it Forward philosophy is inspired by the book and then the movie of the same name. In a way, yes, but my inspiration comes more from the blessings my wife Stephanie and I have received from those that helped us. We believe it’s important for us to continually pay it forward to other so that we can make this world – business and personal – a better place to live.

With that being said, let’s get started.

A New Year, A New Blog

2009 is here. With it comes a new blog for The Pay it Forward Chronicles. As some of you know, I have been working to finish my book - Linking In To Pay it Forward - Changing the Value Proposition in Social Media - for a while.

This blog will now be devoted to the efforts to finish the book, the publishing process and the book's release.

So with that said, the next post is an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

Happy New Year all. May 2009 be your best year yet!