Passive Networking and Building Trust

The type of networking where you shake hands and pass out business cards has its purpose.  However, passive networking is a far more valuable tool for building your brand.  This is where you build your network by offering help and support to others with no strings attached.  Let's look closer at how this can work for you and how to avoid being taken advantage of. Passive Networking Is A Relationship The "friends" and "links" that you have on a social networking site are often a form of traditional networking.  You have contact information or at least a way to contact someone; you also may have a few details about that person.  However, there is no real relationship, and you might even have "friends" on these sites that you have never interacted with outside of accepting an invite.  When we talk about passive networking, we are on the opposite end of the relationship spectrum.  This is our path to building a network of people that we know and like instead of a list of names. Lead With How You Can Help As we will discuss, passive networking starts with an offer to assist someone else.  In a traditional "direct" networking environment this is where you dig deeper than taking a card and listening to an elevator speech.  The kind of questions to ask are along the lines of "what sort of problems do you face?"  Get to know people on a deeper level.  This is how you will become more than a name on a card no matter how fancy that card may look.