This past week I was in Atlanta for a big conference. It was pretty interesting ... the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury was a keynote speaker. This was a different type of event, for sure.
Anyways, as you can imagine there were a lot of people ...
And a LOT of business cards.
Oh geez. People were handing out business cards like it was Halloween. I collected so many in my suit jacket that I felt like I was carrying a deck of Bicycle playing cards ready to hit the blackjack tables.
The only problem was I threw all but 3 of them away.
I'm not saying they were substandard folks, or that I'm some elitist snob. I'm sure they're all remarkable people. The problem is their pitches / introductions / conversation starters were rather UNREMARKABLE.
I was literally struggling to remember the faces these cards belonged to.
With that in mind, I wanted to share a tactic I use called "The Strategic Selfie" (yes, I really call it that).
I have no blog post on this yet, so the best you can do is save this email. I do this to network -- and it works better than passing out business cards. I actually don't even carry business cards ... I do this instead.
- Have a good conversation with a person
- Take selfie with person
- Post on social media and tag that person so they see it
- Connect with them via social over time
- Email them with the selfie so they remember who you are. (Do not assume they remember you, though.)
- Make the ask
I also did this to land Bob Burg (author of the best-seller The Go Giver), Kat Cole of FOCUSbrands (Cinnabon, Moe's, Carvel, and star of a recent episode of Undercover Boss) and more.
Here's my email to Pat Flynn. Adapt it, and network BETTER:
Hi Pat!
My name is Mike Kim, we met briefly at Podcast Movement last summer! (Tim Paige photobombed this, haha):
Thanks again so much for all you do ... I've had some big wins of late because of people linked to SPI:
- just accepted as a contributor to Entrepreneur.com following Kimanzi's advice!!!
- meeting with Aaron Walker and other Nashville-based entrepreneurs in February after hearing him on SPI
- launched a 7-person paid mastermind with a small list (less than 2000 at the time) and even smaller podcast audience at the time (obviously learned so much from you to make that happen)
- was recently on Ken Davis' podcast sharing my story
Are you interested in doing a short 20-min podcast interview to promote the book?
My podcast doesn't have nearly the traffic you do, but it's ranked #1 in "personal branding" and "personal brand" in iTunes and gets about 7,000 downloads a month.
My audience is also outside the normal online entrepreneur crowd (lots of small business owners etc.) so I think Will It Fly would be a really relevant topic to them, and hopefully draw some brick & mortar biz people to the SPI audience!
I'm not a "big name guest" type show (it's usually solo) but I've had our mutual friend Ray Edwards (I'm in his mastermind), as well as pretty cool guys like Bob Burg, Cliff Ravenscraft, Lee Cockerell and a few others.
If you're not taking interviews, no worries and no hard feelings! Just thought I'd reach out and see if I can help.
Please let me know!
P.S. - I'm now in the 6th month of going full-time entrepreneur and love it. You were a huge part of that pivot. If you want to make sure I'm not some weirdo before you make a decision, this is the story of how it happened.
---
Pat accepted, and we're recording his podcast interview tonight in about 5 hours. I even got a free copy of his new book Will It Fly? It's pretty good. No, I cannot send you the copy of his book =)
So you can see in this email I've put a few soft links where Pat can check me out (in case he didn't remember me).
I also use a few bullet points to make the message scannable. The pic breaks up the copy, too.
So there you have it ... Mike Kim's patented Strategic Selfie: Proudly Killing Business Cards and Saving Trees Since 2012.
Mike
P.S. - what are you working on this week?
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