Keith Ferrazzi – Why Social Media is Useless Without Meaningful Relationships
Keith Ferrazzi is a relationship expert who wrote Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back – both of which I love. He came out to Australia recently thanks to The Growth Faculty and gave a workshop. His thoughts on social media are worth sharing!
Below is a transcript too.
Why social media can be useless
The relational intent that you have in social media is what matters. In other words, you can connect with a bunch of people and have no relationships. That’s not a network. A network is a group of individuals that have your back. A network is a group of individuals where you lead with generosity, you don’t lead with ‘what’s in it for me’.
Lead with generosity
When someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn and says ‘will you introduce me to your network?’ I’m like I don’t even know you, of course not. The point is we have to work really hard to, Number 1, authentically care about the people in our network.
Now social media is phenomenal to understand ‘what do people really care about in their lives. Who do they care about in their lives. I find that when i look at someone’s facebook page, I begin to care about them. I begin to understand what really matters to them.
So social media is very powerful at better understanding people and their relationships around them which makes me more relationally inclined to them.
Keeping in touch
The next thing of course is it allows us to stay in touch. Pinging is something that I talk about in Never Eat Alone, which is constantly reaching out, sending emails, staying on people’s radar screen. What a wonderful opportunity using facebook and other forms of social media to stay ‘on touch’ and yes stay connected.
But it’s not a replacement for being relational and going deep. That actually has to do wioth you authentically being generous. Go onto LinkedIn and send a recommendation to somebody that you want to build a better relationship with. That’s the kind of connectedness we are talking about.