Having started Salus Wellness in 2010 with fellow martial artist and long time friend Luca Senatore, I naturally feel emotionally attached to the company that is currently providing a professional working place for nearly 30 complementary health professionals.  Luca and I started the company from scratch: we acquired a wreck of a building previously run (down) by NHS, we did it all up, bought the furniture, created an image and the website, found the first practitioners.  Fast forwarding 2 years and Salus Wellness in 2012 had good position in the marketplace to the point that James Stacey, at that time recently qualified masseur, visited the premises to consider working from a Cambridge based clinic and decided to acquire one third of the company.

In business it is often necessary to be ready to quickly take drastic decisions: a few weeks ago Luca received the typical business offer that could not refuse; having decided to leave he suggested I buy his stake in the company during a board meeting.  I was instinctively positive on the idea and accepted; to my surprise James offered to sell his stake as well.  The definitive decision took a few days to materialise but I am now in for the long term, with the main objective of further growing the business with local practitioners while considering further expansions.

It’s going to be lots of work but I just love the small community of practitioners we have created and glad of this opportunity.  Both Luca and James have been great partners to work with; the strong differences in our characters and personalities worked very well and I personally learnt a great deal from both of them.

The personal relationship between the three of us is as friendly as before if not more because we achieved this agreement in a typical win-win situation.  Luca and I will continue to practice martial arts together and jointly run two small ventures in the local networking space:

• Profit Dojo Networking that runs a monthly networking event at silly o’clock in the morning on the second Friday of the month
• Creating Cambridge that organises two large networking events per year, BIG Summer BBQ and BIG Xmas Party

I was very pleased to feel the great support and congratulation messages from all practitioners at Salus Wellness and I am super excited of now running the company on my own even at times it might work out a bit on the stressful side. As I have spent good part of the last 6 years coaching business owners to be working on their business rather than in their business so I will do my best to avoid the same mistake.

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Image courtesy of businessgrow.com

Having followed and re-tweeted people in the Cambridge area for years it happened more than once that I entered a networking event and I met in person somebody that already knew me via Twitter or I knew them or both.

Earlier this week I met in person Robert Craven a famous author, speaker and marketing strategist, founder of the Directors Centre; as I walked into a conference he was seated having lunch with some people and, seeing me he recognized me, stood up and shook my hand to meet me in person.  Having interacted over Twitter and having commented each other’s blogs for a couple of years we actually never met in person and it was a great coincidence being at the same event and a great opportunity for me to meet a person that I like very much for the work he does and the books he writes.

Last night, out for drinks with friends, I was in a newly opened pub ordering a round when the bar tender after taking the order asked me: “is your name Max?”.  I initially replied that my name is Massimo that is the Italian equivalent but it came natural to ask how he knew it.  He answered that he has been following me and re-tweeting some of my messages when working for another local bar, for which he was managing their Twitter account.

I can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of Twitter given the very high noise to signal ratio; however it works well to develop a personal brand and interact with people that would not be reachable in any other way and more and more of these stories are there to testify it.

Posted under Networking, Social Networks - Please leave a comment

Foursquare has been around since 2009 but I started to use it in 2011.  In fact it was not until I read about it in “the Thank You Economy” written by Gary Vaynerchuck.  Gary mentions Foursquare a few times as a great tool to create buzz about businesses, particularly retails and entertainment so I though I’ll give it a go.  I created a personal account, installed the app on my Android smart phone and started to use is regularly by checking in most places I went to.

I also created a business account for Salus Wellness Clinics, a business I founded in 2010, and run a number of campaigns to encourage people checking in when they visit our premises.

According to Wikipedia:

“Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users “check in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.^[3] Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges”.”

In my simple view of things I see 6 main reasons for businesses and users to use Foursquare:

• Businesses can encourage people to check in and become mayor offering discounts and freebies
• Users can receive incentives to go to a place and check in, letting their friends know that they are doing that
• Businesses have access to a new channel to promote products, services and special offers, being able to measure their effectiveness
• Users can find out new places or special offers thanks to their friends check ins and tips
• Business can hope to capture undecided audience about a place to go (bars and restaurants)
• Users can find in real time where friends are checked in and follow them

I think that Foursquare is altogether a good idea and it could deliver great advantages to both businesses and consumers. In my specific experience some businesses in Cambridge have somehow realized that Foursquare exists but failed to make proper use of it and add the necessary incentives to encourage people to keep using it.  Many of them are actually unaware of Foursquare and its existence and how to use it. That probably the main reason why not many users embraced the platform and therefore the necessary critical mass was never reached.

When I started to use Foursquare I immediately found quite a few people that already were on this social network and they were using it. Within a year the number of people using it, within my network or friends and acquaintances, has not grown significantly so the overall experience has not improved that much.  In my view it failed to go viral as other social networks have done.

Personally I appreciated all the badges and various recognitions I got when I initially checked in several times in the same place; once I realized to be the mayor of the same coffee shop for 8 weeks when I went there once in a while it was obvious that not many people were actively making use of this social network.  Also when I turned up in a very busy bar one evening and as soon as I checked in I realised there was one other person checked in there; it was clear that for hundreds of other people could not care less about the whole thing.

Foursquare is a good idea based on good principles; however the overall concepts can be easily copied by another large social network with plenty of users and consolidated infrastructure; Facebook and Google already did that.  For all of the above reasons I finally decided to give up on Foursquare, at least for now…

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Having lived in Cambridge for nearly 19 years I have experienced a profound, negative, transformation of how people drive on the city streets.  Being Italian I am usually labelled as the person which doesn’t respect the rules, particularly when we talk about traffic rules and regulations.  While in Italy driving aggressively is a need and a necessity I kind of enjoyed the more civilised way of driving once moved here.  British people tend to have more respect for others and queue without too much fuss; this applies to driving etiquette such as giving way to people getting out of driveways or allowing them to turn right across the street when coming in opposite direction by signalling them and slowing down.  While in Italy the yellow light is something you usually cross without too many hesitations but Brits usually stop at it… at least they used to, until some time ago.

Over the last few years though I have experienced what I believe is due to a strong foreign influence on Cambridge streets and that has a negative influence on the overall traffic and street safety.  Less and less people stop when I am driving out of driveway, getting out of parking places and I witness on a daily basis people crossing traffic lights with yellow or even with red light soon after it has switched.  This lack of respect for the street rules is obviously endangering every person on that street and not just the person breaking the law.  What is usually infuriating for me is seeing professional drivers, like taxi and bus drivers, doing the same when, frankly, they should really know better.

I find curious how the law enforcement in this country has gone long way to enforce speed limits by installing thousands of speed cameras by yet no “red light” camera that catches people illegally crossing a traffic light.

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This post is about why you should be using UnTweeps.com to un-follow people that have not tweeted for a long time and therefore cleansing your account.

After you have created an account and start following people many of them will follow you back; this was my simple formula to grow my followers as described in a previous post.  If you keep following new people and keep your account active, by tweeting regularly and reasonably often, you can get to a point that your followers naturally grow to the hundreds or thousands.  My general policy about following/followers is trying to have a good ratio where followers are more than the people you follow.  Considering that the initial scenario for all non-celebrity mortals is to follow more people than they have followers the natural question that arises is: “who shall I un-follow?”

The simplest answer is: “people that have a dormant account, those that have been weeks or months without a single tweet”; why bother keep following them if they are not doing anything on Twitter?  A simple tool that offers just this simple function is UnTweeps.com a web app which, once authenticated your account with Twitter.com, lists people that have not tweeted for a certain period of time (default is 30 days).  I usually try to be a bit more tolerant and set the time to 60 days.  When I just did it earlier today I found 400 (!) people that have not issued a single tweet in 60+ days (some of them 6 months) out of my 4600+ people I was following.  UnTweeps.com displays a list of these people with a tick-box next to each of them so you can inspect and decide who you’d like to un-follow.

There are many other tools that allow sophisticated analysis of followers, following, their habits and general classifications.  In my opinion, the simple rule of thumb of un-following inactive users, simplifies enormously my decision and the whole task.

Posted under Social Networks and it received 2 Comments

Isn’t this one of the most used and misused sentences at networking events?

Try visualising the following scene: you are at a business networking meeting.  Whether the event is managed by a facilitator or more informal, the typical elements are usually as follows:

• a room  with several people talking to each other in pairs or small groups
• some “expert networkers”, those who are visiting any available event in the area and know most of the attendees; they are usually “working the room“, moving from person to person greeting and asking how it is going
• others, a bit more focussed on meeting new people and find out who is that new face
• there is always at least one person that is a total beginner to the concept of networking and perhaps a bit insecure about who to talk to and what topics to discuss
• depending on the type networking event, you can expect some kind of personal introduction or pitch while in other cases simply chatting with people as you “work the room”

Whether this is happening at silly o’clock in the morning for a breakfast meeting, at lunch time or even at an after-work gathering, the scene above describes the typical networking event that covers probably 80% or more of the events I get invited to.

As people meet for the first time it seems a common etiquette to exchange business cards, a kind of ritual that most people seem to be doing for no specific reason; that is the reason I felt inspired to write this article.

In my opinion offering your business card is a good way of providing your details on a neat, well designed and printed piece of good quality paper. The details usually include your phone number, Email address and, in more recent years, some of the available social networking sites.

Now if the purpose of networking is to enlarge your network, you would expect that those spending their time, money and energy to attend such event would plan their visit as part of a strategy that is well aligned and thought within their “marketing mix”.  I am really wondering why most people bother to ask for a card when they meet you; to some extent I am wondering why some people actually bother to go to networking events at all.

If I analyse my personal experience from the beginning of this year I can state that numbers are pretty staggering: having attended approximately 50 networking events between the ones I organise and the ones I have been invited to, I can easily estimate that I have met and exchanged cards with no less than 100 new people.  My usual strategy when I am back from an event is to file each card into my database and send a short Email message where I simply state how nice was to meet the person I am writing to, follow up to the eventual topic we discussed and manifest my willingness to meet again.  In some cases I add a sentence that invites the person to connect with me on LinkedIn. The quite astonishing statistic is that just about 20 of those 100 have even bothered to write back, while 2 of them managed to follow up faster than I did

So here are my few conclusive questions:

• Why are people attending a networking event if not to build relationships that could lead to future businesses?
• What is the value of going to a networking event and collecting business cards?
• If it’s fine to attend the whole event that is 1 or 2 hours long, why there is no time to allocate 10 minutes and properly follow up the new acquaintances?

When I first started my own business in late 2008 I realised to have a very small business network in Cambridge and realised how important it was for me to go out and meet many people.  Having spent the following 30 months attending no less than 2 networking events per week I managed to built a network of hundreds of people. In fact the first time I organised my first own networking event I had  more than 20 people attending; this event is now Profit Dojo Networking.  It attracts an average of 20+ people every month.  Join us at our next event and please follow up the cards you collect.

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