Get in Front of People

A good friend of mine gets a LOT of press. He’s been the subject of cover stories in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. CNN has done many interviews with him. Forbes and BusinessWeek have written about him.

A few weeks after a big article came out in The Wall Street Journal, I asked him about all the phone calls it must have generated. Our conversation went something like this...

“Oh, no, you don’t understand,” he said. “The purpose of press like this isn’t to generate an immediate result.”

I played dumb. “It isn’t?”

“Nope. Sure, we get a handful of calls and plenty of congratulations from people we already know. But the real value of big media is credibility.”

He went on to explain that when he and his team get in front of potential clients, investors, and partners, their thick book of press clippings often makes the difference between a big deal and no deal.

“If all I did was generate press and wait for the phone to ring, I’d have no business at all. To create opportunities, you actually have to get out of the office, and get in front of other people.”

This fits perfectly with my own experience. My social media activities give me a significant advantage when I meet people at conferences or when I start interacting with prospects; they already have a strong sense of what I do and what value I might be able to add. But 95% of my opportunities come from face-to-face interactions.

This also fits well with my overall business philosophy, which is that despite the flood of new technology and new business models, we are still human beings dealing with other human beings.

There is no substitute for spending time with other people.

CREDITS