Is Networking Broken? 🤝

Hello Reader,

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about networking, and how way back in the day—you know... 2009 or so—networking was the backbone of my business development.

Now, you'll often hear me complaining about networking. Which, honestly, is too bad.

The thing is, I really like building relationships, making recommendations to awesome people I know, and learning about the cool work other people are doing! However, that's definitely not how it feels when "doing networking."

In fact, I'm at the point when I get invited to networking groups—as awesome as the hosts may be, my gut instinct is always to say, "No, thank you."

As I was typing another polite no thank you to a lovely person last week, I got thinking again about what the problem is with the way we "do networking" these days.

What I landed on was that rather than meeting folks with curiosity and interest, most networking "opportunities"—including in online spaces such as LinkedIn—feel very transactional when you're in it.

It's a "what can you do for me" situation, not a "how can we support each other" situation.

I've experienced it to the point where I've had folks say to me that they'd love to recommend me, but since I don't pay affiliate or referral payments, they won't. Which is weird to me. I do blame much of this on the way MLM-style tactics have seeped into everyday business, especially in online-first spaces, but it's definitely also a symptom of something bigger too.

Because I'm Old School (I think that's the official label), I learned from my early mentors that recommendations and referrals are supposed to be given without conditions or expectations. This builds trust and demonstrates operating from integrity.

I could go on and on, but what's really tickling the back of my brain is the thought: What if we reframed networking and brought it back to the idea of meeting people and making connections—and didn't see these relationships with colleagues as transactions.

We could literally—especially those of us doing business online—just decide to approach networking differently.

I'm not saying to dump your affiliate relationships or what have you, but I do believe that we all need each other as humans and we are more likely to thrive in community with others.

Listen, I don't have the answers here, but I know when something isn't working. And modern networking simply is not.

I wish I had the answers, but I think a good starting point may be reaching out to an awesome colleague and asking what kind of referrals they're looking for and filing that away for when you encounter just the right match. Even if everyone getting this newsletter asked one person this, it could actually make a huge impact—how cool is that?

Come to think of it, maybe what we need is actually community, not networks.

All right, that's enough musing for this week—happy weekend!

Talk soon,

Sarah

P.S. As you may know, we did a big ol' migration of the SM&Co website last month and I've fielded a bunch of questions about how I did this, including a platform move and lots of content changes, without tanking my search rankings. I'm definitely open to hosting a low-cost workshop to break all this down for you and help you create a checklist for yourself or your designer—but only if there's enough interest. (Putting together workshops is a fair bit of work!) If you're interested, be sure to sign up for the no-obligation waitlist here.