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As someone who travels constantly, it is too easy for me to lose touch with the connections I make in different cities, countries, and stages of career and life. The phrase "here today and gone tomorrow" takes on a whole new meaning when your closest colleague can easily jump on a plane and relocate to the other side of the planet.
I have always valued the relationships in my life but quickly realized that my sometimes transient lifestyle was causing some serious chasms in the friendships, business partnerships, peer networks, and mentor conversations that I held so dear.
Knowing that I needed outside help to solve this problem and keep me in touch with the folks that matter most, both personally and professionally, I enlisted the expertise of fellow traveler and entrepreneur Matt Kress. I met Matt while we were both traveling in Thailand, and noticed that he had apparently mastered this art of keeping in touch with folks from all areas of his life—from his JV partners right down to his old ultimate frisbee teammates from the US and Manila.
When I asked how he was doing this, he explained the new tool he had developed to help himself keep in touch with people. It gamified his interactions with selected contacts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and email. He since developed the tool into a software program called Relately.
The way the system works is quite simple.
I was able to link my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and multiple email accounts to the dashboard. Through the magic of algorithms and software sorcery, Relately merges any contacts that share the same information (same name, same email address, etc.), leaving me with a hefty list to sort through in order to establish those contacts I wanted to make an effort with.
Not only does it designate the people with whom you would like to stay in touch, it also lets you choose how frequently you'd like to stay in touch with them: quarterly, occasionally, frequently, or very frequently. I chose about 40 contacts to start, though Kress advises to stay closer to 20-30 when getting a feel for things (I'm such an annoying overachiever about gamified things).
I know what lots of people are thinking. How pathetic is someone who needs a system to keep in touch with people that supposedly matter to them? It must be all about manipulating people for your own business and professional gains, and people who play those games are to be despised. Yet how many times has someone that you used to be close to crossed your mind as you think, "Gosh, I should give them a call to see how they are doing?" only to move on to the original task at hand and completely forget about that long-lost once-great friend.
Life happens to the best of us. Make keeping in touch with people a priority while it happens.
When I log in every morning, I am greeted with the three most "urgent" contacts I need to reach out to. That means, based on how frequently I want to interact with them and how often I have interacted with them, they are my lowest ranked contacts on a scale of 1-100. Each day, I am able to reach out to and reconnect with three people I should probably be doing a better job of keeping in touch with. Within 10-15 minutes, I've done just that.
The system, however, is only as good as the user. It does not generate canned messages that are sent to your contacts. Doing such would violate the exact reason that Kress created the original spreadsheet and tracking system for himself: Keeping in touch with the people who mattered to him, personally and professionally.
Here are the 3 Types of Messages I Use to Keep in Touch with my Contacts:
Share Their Content - Do they have a great blog or entertaining podcast? I'll go to their site and see if there is anything they have created in the past few weeks that I not only find interesting, but also think my audience will enjoy as well. When I share, I make sure to include them in the message. If they have fallen off my radar, it is likely that I have fallen off theirs as well. This one is all about giving them an easy way to reply quickly without having to type a tome reply. I often schedule such content using Buffer.
Send Them Relevant Things - Have you recently read an article or watched a video and thought, "This reminds me of Jane Doe"? Why not capitalize on that recognition and send them the link. Who DOESN'T like to hear that a friend or colleague has been thinking of them? For quick ease, I use the Chrome extension Send From Gmail to snip the URL and draft an email with one click.
Check In On Life - What have they been up to? Where in the world are they now? How is that project going? This is someone you claim to care about (personally or professionally), so why not send a message that is filled with care? This doesn't mean that you should take this opportunity to pitch them some service or point out problems you have found because you think they will find the information "helpful." If they wanted your help and opinion, they would ask. This is your chance to simply ask how things are, and then sit back and shut up.
This entire system will likely grate at the very nerves and soul of the Anti-Inbox-Zero heroes. While I agree that incoming messages and updates are from other people imposing upon your world, I also welcome many of those impositions. While I don’t put as much thought into tire-kickers and perennial-favor-askers, I am someone who zeroes out her inbox daily (I receive anywhere from 100-250 emails over any 24-hour period) and responds to any replies and mentions on various social media platforms, usually within a day.
This system is merely the outgoing networking and relationship management system that I implement in life and business. Once you get moving on it, you can add more people. You’ll find you do not need the reminders as often to keep in touch with certain contacts. It builds a routine and habit into your connections.
It is important to recognize Relately, networking, and relationship management for their original purpose. This should not be a way to manipulate people into interacting with and liking you. It is instead a way of ensuring that you keep in touch with those who matter.
Replying to people is all about knowing what is important, knowing what is not, recognizing your priorities, and making time and systems for those priorities.
Gary Vaynerchuk said it best (link may not be suitable for work viewing) at the SXSW Interactive Festival this year: "When you stop 'strategizing' people's clout and act like a human being, you will win."
