You know him, he’s at every event, a brilliant conversationalist, give you the shirt off his back. He follows up, keeps his commitments and he’s always happy to make an introduction.
He drinks water at every event, not because it’s healthy, but to save money. He’ll spend hours on Twitter and other social media doing essentially nothing, but won’t spend £50 for a tool that will actually help his business. There’s always a hint of desperation hidden in his voice (or his blog posts) because his business really isn’t doing that well.
He’s drunk the networking & social media cocktail ‘Gottabeseenandloved’ and if you’re not careful, you might easily fall victim to it too.
Networking is fun. Furthermore, there’s rarely any rejection in networking. People can succeed at networking even if they’re not succeeding in their business. And if you’re any good at it at all, occasionally it will work and actually generate you some business. “See? Networking works!” That becomes a validation of whatever you’ve been doing. It doesn’t matter that if you did things a little differently, you could have had ten times the results with the same amount of effort – what you’re doing “works”.
It’s an addiction. And it’s an insidious one at that if it ends up controlling your life.