There’s been a debate brewing around the net as to whether using sites like Facebook and Twitter is more effective than good ol face to face, belly to belly networking.

To me, the debate is as silly as saying whether a ground game or a passing game is more important in football. The team with a ground game that can’t pass will lose and the team with a passing game that can’t run will lose. The team that is merely above average at both (assuming they also have a decent defense) will win every single time.

The same thing applies with networking. I’ve had online businesses where I didn’t know the people on my email lists. I’ve also had offline businesses where I didn’t use a lot of social media. The results from both were mediocre and frustrating.

Recently, with Dayton SEO Services, I combined the two worlds. Wow, when you truly, truly get this, you will be amazed at what you will find.

Here is my process now when I meet someone….

1. Attend events, meet people and get their business card
2. Enter their contact information into an Excel spreadsheet
3. Upload the spreadsheet into SendOutCards and send my new friend a card
4. Upload the spreadsheet into my email autoresponder and invite them to join my email list. Make sure to get your new friend’s permission by using double opt in. I use Get Response, but I hear Constant Contact is better. It’s a royal pain to move an email list so I just haven’t done it yet.
5. Import the Excel list into Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn to add them to my friends list
6. Paste the email addresses from Excel into Twitter and follow them
7. Blog on a regular basis and automatically sync it with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
8. Send emails to the autoresponder list on a regular basis to invite people to read the blog. Constant Contact even has a way to automatically sync this with the blog through the blog’s RSS feed. Once it’s set up, you dont even need to log into your Constant Contact account. It just goes out automatically every time you update the blog.
9. Get people’s birthday from Facebook and Plaxo and add that info into SendOutCards so I can send them a birthday card. Facebook has a really cool calendar app (I think it’s called Hallmark Calendar) that does this. SendOutCards has a very slick set it and forget it feature called campaigns where I can set it up once in under 10 minutes and birthday cards go out to everyone on the right date.
10. Schedule one on one appointments to get to know my most important contacts. I just go to meet and learn more about them. I’m NOT there to sell anything.

I hope these tips help you out. If they do, please leave a comment below. I certainly didn’t make this stuff up. I want to thank Kody Bateman and the team at SendOutCards for teaching me this at their very powerful Treat Em Right Seminar. I also want to thank Tony Scelzo, Larry Kevin Adams and all members of the amazing Rainmakers team. I’ve learned so much in just the short time that I’ve been with them. If you haven’t checked out Rainmakers yet, what are you waiting for?