Welcome to Kiwi Scrum - Public Comments

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Name: Sarah Lochead-MacMillanDate: 7 June, 2010

$LM Group

My whole business has been built on networking. I do not believe in "open networking" per se, but more in being open to networking. I rarely connect with people I have not met or been introduced to.

The key to effective networking is to ALWAYS add value to others before you expect to receive. Only by adding value and giving others opportunity to get business will you truly receive those quality referrals you are seeking, be it business referrals or network contacts.

Hello Sarah

Thank you to responding to the plea on the Kiwi Scrum page for New Zealanders to develop more connections. Your high networking principles and standards are to be admired. In a personal note to you I commented on the quality of your LinkedIn Profile page. The quality of your networking effort is obvious to me. I see about 10 NZ based pages like yours every year.

The comments on the Kiwi Scum Page are aimed at what I see every day. People who have joined Kiwi Scum but don't have more than 5 or 10 connections and little idea about what to do.

For them the most effective way to get going is to build a base using Open Networkers. If you read the Kiwi Scrum Guide you'll see that we don't suggest that is the best strategy. We suggest developing a network in three directions, close and personal, targeted and purposeful, and diverse and random. Or if you like, people in your personal and social world, people from your business and professional world and a good mixture of total strangers. Long experience online has demonstrated many times the huge value of the "total strangers" category.

I commend your networking approach Sarah, but you are being excessively hard on yourself. Online, and especially in LinkedIn, there is room for a little serendipity and randomness, that sometimes produces surprisingly valuable results.

John S Veitch
The Network Ambassador

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