Keith Ferrazzi – Why Social Media is Useless Without Meaningful Relationships

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Updated on July 8th, 2013

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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.

Hi this is Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone.

Why social media can be useless

You know it’s interesting about social media. Social media is another connection point we can all use to broaden the touch points, the connections that we have, but it doesn’t necessarily assume that you’re going to build a relationship.

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

Never Eat Alone

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.

So just remember connections are not relationships but they are powerful particularly if we have the relational intentionality.

More about Keith Ferrazzi

For more you visit www.keithferrazzi.com or follow @keithferrazzi.

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About Adam Franklin

Adam Franklin is the bestselling author of Web Marketing That Works. He is an international social media speaker and CEO of Bluewire Media. His blog was Australia's #1 Business Blog and his podcast was #9 on the top marketing podcasts in Entrepreneur magazine. His work has featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post and iTunes. Download the popular Web Strategy Planning Template which has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His weekly 'Bluewire News' email goes out to over 32,000 readers.