PS Maybe you can put in a word for me with Penny and Thomas. I am keen to start to feature their material on this blog.

I was fortunate to be a speaker at the BNI Directors conference last week in California, where I met a certain Mr Graham Southwell.

Anyway, at the event I got introduced to Niiraj Shah, National Director of BNI India and passed him my Business Card. On looking at my card he told me “Oh, I’ve heard about you, one of my members in India has been talking about you”…the thing is that member in India is one of my ecademy connections that had attended one of my free webinars promoted on ecademy.

What this did in an instant is it gave further credibility to the introduction made, as not only was I being introduced to Niiraj by a respected BNI person, but he then had some connection between myself and one of his members which had already been formed in advance by social media/ecademy networking.

As they say the real power of networking online an offline is what people are saying about you when you are not there.

As part of the test Thomas Power did on ecademy I was one of those who got a lot of connections in a short time, and this power of numbers came into play with a few connections that led to speaking engagements.

Of course as well all know the “accidental connection” is just the start, that opens the door, it is still down to us to build deep relationships from that point on.