Bringing Your Online Contacts into the Real World

You’ve taken the time to build your online community of key people that you want to know better and may even want to do business with one day. You engage your community in conversation and you really feel like you’re building a strong base. However, you have more than 1,000 contacts and you don’t really know what to do next. 

How do you bring your online contacts into the real world?

Here are some tips:

Invite your “friend” to breakfast

For starters, if you feel like you have a strong relationship with someone online, invite him/her for breakfast or coffee. Once you have a meeting date set, don’t feel uncomfortable. You already know the person from talking online, so the conversation shouldn’t feel awkward. It should feel natural and relaxed.

After that, stay in contact with each other either through the social networking site where you met or via email. The more you talk, the more likely you will be doing business with this person or maybe even getting referrals.

Continue to attend networking events

Even though you are online, it doesn’t mean that you should stop all of your other marketing activities. You will be pleasantly surprised when you bump into one of your social networking friends and already feel like you know that person.

I can’t tell you how often that happens to me. Every time I give a seminar or attend a networking meeting, I always bump into someone I know from either Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk, Kornk, and the list goes on and one. When I meet up with my online “buddies,” I already have a connection with them and we have a meaningful conversation. After that, we make sure to stay in touch and get together every so often to network and help each other’s businesses.

Establish a networking group

You may consider inviting key “friends” from your social networking site to a networking event at your office or in a local coffee shop or diner. When I opened an office to Rochester, NY, I didn’t know hardly anyone in town. I knew my vice president and she knew a few people, but for the most part we were starting from scratch. 

We set up a Rochester networking group on Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo hoping that our upstate friends would join. To our surprise, we had more than 50 people join up. Every month thereafter, we would meet with various professionals in Rochester for dinner or drinks after work. This helped us develop stronger relationships in Rochester and the upstate area.

Taking your online community off line is easier than you think. You just need to make an effort to do so. Don’t procrastinate and get to work!

You will be surprised at how fast you build your business and get new friends along the way.