Building a Pre-Meet Platform

I was browsing the many, many pages of social media blogs this morning and found a post by Steve Woodruff. His blog StickyFigure has some great content and his post, The Personal ROI of Social Media is one of those posts. I am going to borrow a concept from his post and expand upon it: the pre-meeting.

From Steve’s post:

“Through bloggging and Twittering, I have “pre-met” a vast array of people who have shared interests in marketing, branding, social media, pharma, and other aspects of life. By having initial contact in the safe zone of social media, a shared sympathy has been built up, irrespective of any borders of geography, race, background, and political leanings.”

I thought to myself… hmm… It is always good to try and fit a visual description of an idea in order to help people remember the concept. If you are using social media as a platform to build a business network that far surpasses  anything in your location.. you are on the right track.

Social media allows you to pre-meet thousands upon thousands of people and then decide whether you want to take that relationship to the next level and meet at a conference or by other means. You could almost think of it as a pre-screener. Ehh, I would rather not meet them in person. Blah.

I encourage everyone venturing into the social media world to pre-meet and extend a hand to the people you find interesting in the online environment. If you have a location based social network (like Smaller Indiana in Indianapolis) it is important to have these offline meetings to further strengthen your online network.

Build the pre-meeting platform and you will flourish. Just remember to take it offline sometimes too.

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