“If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there.” – Martin Blank, Grosse Pointe Blank.
“Networking isn’t really about you. It’s what you can do for other people to make a mutually beneficial connection and relationship” – us, constantly
It happens more often than I care to remember at this point.
Someone random shows up in my inbox. That happens a lot, and so is nothing new. Because of what we do, it’s also not uncommon for it to be from someone that I’ve never heard of before, who has never been to one of our events, has had no affiliation with either me or IT in the D at all before. Again, kind of to be expected at this point – “when’s the next event?”, “how do I join your group?”, “after reading [x] article, I think you’re an idiot” – it happens.
But it’s the ones that expect us to be their damned marketing department that really get me seeing red…
This exchange actually happened last week:
Random email I receive:
“Hello, I’m hosting several events in the next couple of months [events redacted]. How do I get these events listed on your website?”
No “hey, love your site”, no “wow, you guys have a great audience”, no “hey, we met at [place]” (and I searched…never met this person anywhere), and so they’ve already violated just about every single rule of networking. Avoiding my initial impulse to just blast back with both barrels, I decided to take the high road and sent back:
Hi [name redacted] – not quite sure what these events would have to do with our audience though.
Don’t get me wrong, they seem like they’re for worthy causes, but they’re not something we’re involved with at all.
Can you clarify for me? What are you looking for here?
Simple, clean, and straight to the point I thought. I mean, they all sounded like semi-worthy causes, and it’s not like we’re against helping people or anything…but we’re also not going to just plaster all kinds of nonsense all over our website for any random who shows up in our inbox either.
But then I get back…
You pretty much answered the question. Apparently you only post about events you’re involved with that you think your audience would be interested in.
Ummm…duh? I mean, “duh” doesn’t even begin to describe my thoughts right then. Of course we only post about stuff we’re involved with and of course we only post about things our audience would be interested in. You guys would hate us if we started turning this site into Yelp and started spamming you with “Aunt Mabel’s Garage Sale and Pork Roast Fundraiser” and every other stupid, nonsensical piece of junk event that we hear about. I mean…give me something. Give me some kind of reason why this is valuable to us, or to you, our site visitors and readers.
Here’s the best part. Again, still trying to take the high road, I even bit back the venom and sent off…
Well, you have to understand – we are many things…but one of the things we aren’t is a random advertising platform for anyone who wants to show up in our inbox 🙂
I’ll take a look at your site and FB page. While it might not be something we’d throw out on our site, you are doing good things, and that might mean it’s a good idea to have you as a guest on our weekly show that reaches around 100,000 people per episode. Would you be interested?
Crickets.
Absolute, stone cold silence from that point forward. No replies, no “thanks for the offer”, no anything. Just…silence.
Sorry I didn’t give you the immediate gratification you were looking for by plastering your crap all over our site, LinkedIn group and Facebook page.
Oh wait, I’m not sorry. I’m actually the opposite of sorry.
Because we are not your marketing department.
That’s all for this time, go read something else: https://itinthed.com/read/