I’m Summer-cleaning my emails at the moment. Unfortunately I’ve let Outlook store lots of important information too long. Our new IT manager is likening this to storing important documents at a motorway service station. So 26,000 need pruning down to a manageable number before we burden The Cloud.
As I’m doing this there are business contacts I’m being reminded of that I haven’t spoken to in a while. Always on a guilt trip that I should spend more time ‘networking’ and ‘keeping touch’, I’m starting emails to them with “How are you? What’s new? How is everything?”
However, one particular contact is ‘Mr Networking North West’. An early adopter of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and all things social networking, he spends time an effort letting everyone know of almost everything he is doing and thinking. The trouble is most of my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube contacts are doing the same. And I need to filter and select what I can practically follow and still manage to get things done. Which brings me back to my dilemma.
How do you ask someone so social media switched on, how they are? You are supposed to know aren’t you?