So I admit, I know a lot of people. In fact, a lot more people know me and I know them…somehow over the last few years, I became, as described by one of my friends, a ‘super-connector’. I love trafficking in ideas and meshing together all the pieces of a good idea. In a few short minutes, I can usually find the right person to vet through an idea or recruit new team members. This wasn’t always the case. In fact, during the first 6 or 7 years of my career, I had made very few strong connections and relationships. Now, on paper it didn’t appear to be the case, I had received a lot of press when I was very young and a lot of people knew of me or my company but I didn’t really have many strong relationships of my own.
If I was to surmise a reason, I would say it was because I a decade or two younger than most people I interacted with and lacked both the emotional intelligence and life experience to really connect with people properly.
Alas, I had decided to get back into the NYC internet industry, after taking time off to run an outsourcing company and finishing school. During those years, I lived in my apartment, traveled for business now and then but didn’t go out of my shell, I was basically on the phone and IM doing business development and managing people in India. I had lost touch with my roots.
So I’m back in NYC and I need to develop my network. I wasn’t quite sure what I would do but here is what I did.
1. I started a thread on the social network, asmallworld for people interested in seed capital and hosted a meeting, 40 people showed up and I began to develop my networking group which led into many other areas.
2. I reached out through the Binghamton Alumni network and connected with one person also in the online media industry. He put me in touch with one of his friends, a recruiter who put me in touch with more people.
3. I attended a meetup, but I also started doing posts on their forum, got to the tech meetup early and hang around and stayed after and ended up at dinner with Scott and a bunch of cool people from the community. At the next meetup, I presented as well.
4. I met someone who was new to nyc and looking to meet new people. I dug through my network and made 10 introductions for him to key people. (just about everyone I knew). He actually got mad at me for making quick and short introductions and I never really talked to him since. But from that experience, I realized a way to leverage my network. What I did was I introduced all of the top people I knew to each other, even without a specific reason but I cross pollinated my network and so everyone thought I knew the other one very well and that I knew a lot of people. Then as I kept meeting new people, I kept fueling the fire and making introductions. In a short period of time, I had built a fairly large network and everyone was interlinked so I became a topic of conversation and a connector. In order to do this, you need just a few contacts, not even strong relationships so if you know 2 or 3 people that could be good to talk to each other, several steps over your head, even if you barely know them, by connecting them to each other, it looks like you know a lot of powerful people really well. Eventually, if you do it correctly, it becomes true.
5. I joined industry trade groups and volunteered to be on the event planning board. By doing this you get to help set the agenda for the industry and when the event happens, you can take credit for it (deservingly) but everyone thinks you know everyone and that you’re the man for producing a good event.
6. I was also recruiting for C-level positions for whatever company I was working on and interviewing great people. Even if the opening is contingent on raising money, just in idea stage or anything else, its important to always be recruiting but when you recruit talk to people, don’t sell and you can meet some really great people who are open minded and looking for something new so even if the job doesn’t open up, you can meet great people in the process in a really easy way.
So those 6 steps got me to the first stage, then 18 months ago, I told a friend of mine that I wanted to be more well known so I engaged in a few publicity stunts. None of them took a great deal of time but were much fun and I made sure enough people who were big talkers knew of them.
What were they?
1. I leveraged the NY tech meetup list to its fullest (it was around 5,000 people at the time) by creating 2 drams.
2. first, I decided to run for the peoples’ choice most influential people in Silicon Alley list and decided that I wanted to place at the top. I figured that if I placed high enough, I could say I came in X in my signature and whenever I emailed with new people, they would say ‘wow, that’s interesting’. So what did I do? I marketed myself. I had lists of people from my events and I hit up a few key forums where I knew people and emailed 20 friends to spread the word. After all it was a peoples’ choice contest so it was all about self-promotion.
So one of the girls on the list saw one of my promotional posts and wrote to the list ‘exposing’ me for promoting my nomination. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I used it was a way to engage the entire list in active discussion, intentionally maxed out the thread count with dozen of messages so my email address was showing up in everyone’s email box and offered to withdraw my nomination and publicly apologized. Why?
The best way to take the punch out of an argument is simply offer to resign. It takes people back 180 degrees to see what they really wanted to get out of their argument. Smart people see the tactic and back down, not so smart people actually accept it (and if you do it right, you should only do it in a case where you are integral or you know people will back you up and yell on your behalf) – but doing it in a public forum, guarantees everyone’s engaged. Of course, this was a peoples’ choice contest and the whole point was self promotion and I knew I had friends that would stand up for me and that’s what happened. And I thought it was hilarious… and as it turns out the girl who ‘called me out’ has become a close friend.
The second stunt involved Microsoft…. So I have an XBOX 360 and I barely ever played it but my then girlfriend bought me a game for a present and I put it in the machine and the machine scratched it up after 1 use. Really annoying. I called MSFT and they replaced the console but refused to replace the game. So I was pissed and called up and tried to get someone who can replace my game on the phone. They all said to contact the game maker not them – yet it was MSFT’s device that killed the game. The game maker wouldn’t replace it so I was stuck. And not a single person at MSFT had the authority to do the right thing. So what did I do?
I wrote an open letter to bill gates calling for Steve Ballmer’s firing because he doesn’t give a crap about their customers. I sent the letter publicly to the tech list and posted it on a rumor site, knowing it would make some waves. This sparked a line of discussion on the list, again maxing out the thread count. (my goal was a) have fun with MSFT and b) get my game replaced since my GF spent $60 on it).
Note: most public companies have a fax line to the audit committee of their board so that people can report corporate malfeasance. This line usually goes to a direct of the company or an immediate emissary because it is meant for the most sensitive of information. So what did I do? I faxed my open letter to the audit committee.
Now, all my letter said was detail my experience attempting to get MSFT to own up to the fact that their machines killed my game and their refusal to replace it – and calling them out on a lack of customer service. Not crazy, I just had written the letter in a very specific way to garner a very specific response out of any readers.
So I get a call from someone in MSFT from their ‘special cases’ group, a group that didn’t exist to me a week earlier. In fact I asked the guy who called why the customer service people lied to me about his existence and he couldn’t answer me. I then said that it was too late for a lame apology from someone who supposedly didn’t exist, I wanted a personal apology from Steve Ballmer for his lack of caring about his customers. I thought it was reasonable. Someone’s company fucks up, so the CEO takes responsibility for it. That was not to be the case. So I then went back and forth with him for a while and reported these goings on through my channels. In the end, nothing happened. It was good fun though.
So while this was going on, a friend of mine asked me why I was making myself stand out so much and I said ‘well, I want to make sure people remember me, in 6 months, they will remember me but forget the circumstance of all this’. And that’s pretty much what happened. I gave up the antics (which was great entertainment) and went under the radar again.
Along the way, I continued to produce events and when you produce events that people like, they talk about them and bring friends. So I continued to leverage my events into ever larger events culminating in producing the bootstrappersummit and launching 2 conferences directly for Alan Meckler, the CEO of Jupiter Media and now I know almost all the key people in the digital advertising, tech and venture conference industries.
When you produce a conference or an event, you have an amazing power at your fingertips, the ability to invite people to speak or blog – or feed their ego. Nothing is more powerful than feeding someone’s ego and when you have 40 speaking spots to give away, you can connect with 150 people for those spots and everyone one of them will look up to you. It’s also an amazing way to cut right to the top of any organization. It works 8/10 times and is so easy to do.
Also by running Bootstrapper.com, I occasionally interview people I would like to meet as well as invite people to write guest blogs. Another way to do people a favor and give them a forum. Everyone loves to speak, talk, write etc…
I also have a policy that I will meet and buy anyone a cup of coffee that asks to meet with me and try to help them if I can. I give away a lot of free ideas and advice and make a lot of introductions for people. My general policy is if people are doing anything outside of online advertising / direct marketing, I will help them gratis and just connect the dots though if they are in my industry, I would expect some type of compensation for it (if it’s in my industry, I’m not going to give away the farm to someone who can eventually be a competitor for free though I’m happy to in any other sphere) and so I’ve helped probably 100 people in the last 2 years and have more thank you emails than I can count. Several companies have been built because of ideas I’ve given, partners I’ve connected, deals I’ve struck and investors I’ve connected and it’s a really good feeling to know you helped people get going.
The end result of everything is that I know a ton of people and I know how they all interact and by connecting people to each other my network has grown exponentially to the point where in my industry, I pretty much have access to anyone I need access to usually in a matter of minutes. Most of the top startups in the ad space, I tend to see before anyone else (because I usually know the founders) and have made a meaningful impact on a number of them, connecting people with executives, investors, speaking gigs and general industry penetration strategy.
I readily agree that using Facebook professionally is not for everyone. But, for those of us in need of a strong network, Facebook is a valuable tool. I have yet to find an alternate social network used by so many of the folks with whom I want to keep in touch or get to know.
I was recently asked why I started 
