Networking Mistakes Executives Make

Networking is one of the biggest buzz words today. It is a must for executive jobs as much as it is for rank and file employees. Because of its increasing popularity, it is sometimes misused and abused. For one, networking is sometimes seen as a way to give out as many business cards as possible, without acknowledging how it is supposed to be a two-way thing.

Let’s get one thing straight. Networking is about building relationships, not about marketing or selling yourself. To make sure that you don’t make it into something it’s not supposed to be, here are networking mistakes that you need to avoid or stop doing:

Being too shy to be specific
Surely you have more concrete plans than simply wanting to build a company that you own and using the skills that you learned in the corporate world. If you want to be helped by executives, you should bounce off ideas that will stimulate the minds of the people you talk with, instead of taking them into the cloud where there’s nothing but fluff.

Abusing Internet Networking and Not Maximizing Personal Opportunities
LinkedIn and other professional social networks are great avenues to build a network of professionals and executives. You can find groups for those who are excels in accounting jobs, and groups for animators and artists as well.  However, while they offer a lot of advantages, they can also be abused and misused. For instance, oftentimes you will see executives who are obviously only posting in the Internet just to be seen and to show the world that he exists in the corporate landscape.

The key to being able to maximize the internet is to use it to share valuable bits and pieces of information, and to interact with other professionals on topics and subjects that interest you. Commenting on something that you don’t know much about will only make you look like a trying hard person who wants to belong but just couldn’t.

Pay attention to personal meetings. After all, how often do you get to talk with other professionals who are in the same line of work as yours? Whenever you get the chance to network through face-to-face communications, grab the opportunity and really spend time in the conversations. You can easily delete an email or leave a LinkedIn discussion, but you can’t do that in a meeting.

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