 We talked about relationships as part of your social capital, and many people think, oh, great, all I gotta do is just start throwing everyone that I know at other people that I don't know, and now I'm making connections, and I'm really helping myself. That's actually the wrong way to go about it. For many of the people that you're looking to connect with, they have their own mission that they're on. They have a lot on their plate, and a willy-nilly introduction of someone they don't know, even if you think that person could benefit them out of the blue, puts a lot of pressure on them. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell, and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like, and share our videos with your friends. For a lot of people, they're like, well, I just don't feel like going out. Well, then you don't have a why. If you had a why, if you had a reason, if you had a mission, you would be compelled to get off your couch and turn off Netflix, because Netflix isn't giving you the satisfaction that pursuing your mission would. Absolutely. I agree there, and understand the long game in all of this. You know, all of that would have been short-circuited with an initial ask right up front. Can you do this for me? Can I get this out of you, AJ? Can I leverage this, Johnny? Hey, Michael, I wanna be doing something. Can you help me? Right? That's not how this works. When you approach this as I'm making genuine connections, I'm offering value, I'm being emotionally supportive, I'm sharing my knowledge, and I'm making introductions, then you go a long way to growing and compounding that social capital that's so valuable. Now, I do wanna make a caveat around introductions, because we talked about relationships as part of your social capital, and many people think, oh, great, all I gotta do is just start throwing everyone that I know at other people that I don't know, and now I'm making connections, and I'm really helping myself. That's actually the wrong way to go about it. For many of the people that you're looking to connect with, they have their own mission that they're on. They have a lot on their plate, and a willy-nilly introduction of someone they don't know, even if you think that person could benefit them, out of the blue, puts a lot of pressure on them to not know what to say or do with this introduction, or maybe they don't even get the context from you of what the introduction is about, and it falls flat, and it actually makes you look bad. So we prefer the double opt-in strategy. What a double opt-in means is you personally reach out to each person that you would like to introduce and you supply context to each of them. Hey, Michael, I'd love to introduce you to one of my favorite public speakers, Ted. Ted is talking, he's an expert in these three areas, and he just gave a great TEDx talk on this. Would you be open to meeting him? All right, so that gives Michael an opportunity to one, say yes, I'm ready to meet someone, or two, say, hey, I'm really busy preparing for my upcoming talk. I don't really have time to grab coffee or lunch. Love to do it in the future, thanks for thinking of me. So you give Michael an opportunity to say yes or no. Then you go to Ted and you go, hey, Ted, my best friend, Michael, he's an accomplished speaker. These are the three subjects he's speaking about on stage, and I saw you guys are going to the same event in three months. I'd love to throw an introduction your way. Would you be open to it? And now Ted can say, oh, you know what? I'm actually not going to be going to that event. I haven't let the organizers know that I'm not going to be attending. And I just, I'm pretty slammed on this book that I'm writing, right? That double opt-in goes a long way to show that you value each person's time, you care about them, and you're not going to waste any of that valuable social capital that you have. What I find time and time again, and I get it, we're young, we're trying to show off that we have some connections, we're trying to help everyone, and we get this all the time. Hey, there's this guest that I want to introduce you to. I'm going to CC him. Hey, AJ, meet Tom. Okay, Tom, AJ, go do your thing. And I'm like, I don't know who Tom is. I don't know what he talks about. Does he even know the podcast? And then all of a sudden I'm on a call with Tom where neither of us know each other and we can't actually work together. And now we both feel like our time was wasted and we're going to blame you for that sloppiness in your introduction. So the double opt-in is the best strategy to be respectful of either party. And when you get affirmed, yes, they remember that connection even more because you were so thoughtful in the way that you set it up. So that's how we leverage our connections, our relationships, right? So we've talked about knowledge. I'll give you one more example because I know we have a lot of young listeners. Imagine being in the front row from Michael's talk, taking a great video with your mobile phone, then going home and editing a TikTok video, editing Michael's talk in the 60 seconds and saying, hey, I really enjoyed it. I made this little TikTok video, feel free to share it. Michael might not have a video team editing his videos to create TikToks. He could really value that to be able to put that on his social media and show off what he just did on stage. That's a way that you can offer that valuable knowledge that you have in all this new tech and all these new platforms that many of the people who are two, three, four steps ahead of you in their career just aren't engaging with because they don't have the time. So being thoughtful in what knowledge and value you have to offer is a great way to foster these deeper connections. So I have the perfect example for this and I didn't have to do any editing whatsoever. I was sitting in the third or fourth row and the speaker was up, an elderly lady and she gave this amazing talk and the two ladies sitting right in front of me, they were like super animated. They were like so excited. And I'm thinking to myself, maybe that's their mom, maybe, right, maybe. So I took a photo where the both heads were like on one side and the lady on the stage was in the middle and I just took a photo. It wasn't even a good quality. And later on, when I bumped into them, I was like, hey, was that your mom? And she was like, yeah, I was in the talk amazing. I said, I took a photo of you 3D wanna have it. So I ended up with all of their contact information and I was like their best friend at the event because I was so thoughtful to take a really not that great photo that for them now is a really precious moment to remember because that's the only photo they have of the two daughters watching their mom on the stage. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. It's a beautiful example. And again, we're not talking firing up final cut bro and Googling how to cut this magical five minute trailer, but these small little bursts of effort and favor and energy that you put out into the world come back in so many different ways that you can't even possibly realize if all you're thinking about is what can I get out of this situation? So let's talk about after the event. We gave you some great strategies to lead up to the event, some amazing strategies for how to approach all the people you wanna meet at the event. Of course, we recommend you use the conversation formula. Let's talk about what to do after the event because that's really where the rubber meets the road. That's where you start to solidify those connections you've made because I will tell you, I've gone to so many events where I come home with a pocket full of business cards of people that I'm excited to work with and I wasn't the best at taking great notes and I couldn't remember all those conversations and they just never followed up with me and all those great ideas that we had all that great momentum at the event just died. Day three, Sunday evening when everyone was flying home. So while the iron is hot, while things are top of mind jot down your notes, your remembering those memories of the event and all the connections you made and start the follow up so that as these people you met are landing back home, they're hopping on their LinkedIn, they're checking their Facebook, they're opening their email for the first time, you're there in their inbox, offering that emotional support, giving that bit of knowledge, or saying, hey, that was such a great conversation. I'd love to introduce you to these two people. What do you say? That's gonna set you so far ahead again in my experience and I didn't do this myself early on in my career. When I was trying to be a professional networker and I was really trying to grow my network and I missed out on so many opportunities because I just failed to follow up. And you have to realize that many of these events, they're double triple stacked. Many of these speakers, they're on a tour where they're speaking at a ton of events. So if you let days go by, if you let weeks go by and you think they're just gonna remember you because that conversation was so memorable for you, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot. So I would say I would not wait more than 24 hours after the end of the event to start the reach out and the follow up and making sure that you're adding everyone on the platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, because let's be honest, many of us don't all engage in all of those platforms. Some of our podcast guests that we've had on have told me straight up, I don't check LinkedIn. Not a great place to connect with me. Some have said, hey, I'm only in my Instagram DMs. Others have said I deleted Facebook. So you have to understand, putting those tentacles out on every single platform, reaching out to them on every single platform, whatever platform they accept you on, then starting the messaging is the best strategy you can have to start following up and enriching these connections you've made at that event. First and foremost, I get so important to reach out. I can't emphasize how important it is to maybe block out half a day after the event, even before you go to the event, because that's how long it must take to reach out to all of them and just let them know, hey, it was nice to meet you. But my go-to follow up would be, hey, it was so great to meet you at the conference. Happy to talk about X, Y and C, whatever it was. Wanted you to have my contact information as well. Have a good day, Michael. That's it. And whenever I give you, AJ or Johnny, my business card, and I say, hey, that was a really good idea. Will you get in touch with me? And you're like, yeah, yeah, of course, but I don't have any more business cards. Give me yours, I'll be in touch. And you don't, I will remember you guys. I will remember you at the next event that we had a really great idea that I can't remember anymore, that you had my business card and you didn't reach out. And the last, my favorite way, and this probably doesn't work for everyone, but my favorite way of following up is that whenever I have a good connection with someone at an event, I take a selfie with them. Not, oh, let's do a duck face for Instagram or there. But more like, hey, let's do a selfie so we can remember this. And then I ask the other person to do a silly face. I might be like, hey, let's look like we're angry at each other. It's not that the boring everyday fanboy selfie, but it's this, let's pretend we're both bank robbers at this event here. And we're going to, let's take a selfie together. And then we're laughing about the selfie and that's what I'm sending them the next day. It's like, by the way, here's the silly selfie we took together. Now they remember my face, they have my email address, they have my contact information and they share that funny moment that we had together as we were like posing like bank robbers for a selfie. And remember, if you took anything valuable from what was shared in conversation or from stage and you applied it in your life, that follow-up of the impact it's had on you, whether it's weeks or months later is incredibly valuable to that speaker. So you send your initial message where you identify where you met them, what the conversation was, maybe you include that silly selfie idea that Michael shared. And then three months later, after you put that little habit tactic into action or you actually had a great conversation with someone they introduced you to and it turned into a project or you've changed careers and now you're really excited to learn more about something. That's a great reason to reach back out to that person to maintain that connection, that loose tie.