Important: This blog series was previously posted regarding our 2024 Conferences, but the information is still valuable! To learn more about our 2025 Conferences, held October 21-22 in Las Vegas, click here. There is still time to register – in-person and virtual options available!

 

This is the last post in a four-part series on networking.

Imagine it’s the end of the conference. All that hard work you put in with pre-conference planning and in-person mingling and note-taking won’t be fully maximized if you don’t act on it in a timely manner. Life moves fast, and we get sucked back into the grind of work, managing kids, or even traveling back home from the conference. I like to do a few things within a week of any event.

Social media post with insights from the event (I mostly do this if I’ve attended something virtually). Sometimes, it starts conversations with others who were there that I can follow up on later. Sharing other people’s posts with your additional thoughts can be an easy way to get used to more active professional social media use. Funny enough, this bullet point is at the edge of my comfort zone, and I’m trying to get better at it.

Personal messages on LinkedIn (or via email if I got their business card) thanking them for the nice conversation we had (referencing a tidbit I can remember) and including where I met them. This last part comes in handy if you’re scrolling through your LinkedIn or you see a name that seems familiar but you can’t place it because you can go back and search your emails or messages. Putting the “where” in the message helps me jog my memory. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

The note can be as simple as “Hi [Name]! It was great discussing our mutual interest in [thing] at [conference] [last week/last night/yesterday]. I look forward to keeping in touch!”

Update your personal CRM. If I’m feeling extra ambitious (and I have been this past year), I’ll add any networking updates to my personal CRM housed in knowledge management software (my software of choice right now is RoamResearch). There are articles on how you can set it up, but the long and short of it is that I create a page for the event, include my technical notes and learnings and include the speakers and attendees who I met, what we talked about (or at least as much as I can remember), and any follow-ups I’d like to do in the future to build our relationship. Each of these folks gets their own page too. This is might all sound too transactional—It’s not how I look at it. I truly enjoy meeting new people and building relationships. It’s such a great feeling to make a connection with another person in such a disconnected world. I believe that a rising tide raises all ships, and the more we invest in each other, the better off we’ll all be. I just happen to be very methodical and organized about it. I am a Virgo after all.

I also find Sahil Bloom’s suggestions for creative follow-ups to be really interesting and they dovetail nicely from what I’ve described above:

As an example, I used to talk about my favorite books with new people. If it struck me as a relationship I hoped to deepen, I would follow up by sending the person a copy of the book with a handwritten note to their office. I’ve built many great mentor relationships with that as the start.

A few ideas for thoughtful, creative follow-ups:

• Share an article or podcast that you think the person will like for a specific reason.
• Provide value in the form of a new idea related to one of their points of professional tension that was uncovered in the conversation.
• Offer to connect them with another friend given a shared interest.

The aim is to show that you were listening intently and that you took the initiative to follow up.

– Meaghan Nelson