The key to being successful with Social Networking is building relationships. Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point talks about how small actions done over time will add up to a moment when things explode.

This same principle applies to building relationships.  Making new connections on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is very easy. Turning those connections into relationships takes some work.

The good news is that you can use technology to help you turn contacts into relationships. Remembering and recognizing someone on their birthday is a very powerful tool.

Yesterday I sent one of my casual contacts an electronic birthday card – I was notified that they had a birthday through Plaxo. The action took me less than 30 seconds to complete.

I just received a message from her telling me how I made their day! Who would have thought that this would be the case? I now have a much stronger connection with her thanks to a small action on my part.

Making someone’s day and delighting them is a great way to build relationships. The more we do this the more we are building our relationship capital (RC.)  RC is a form of currency that will yield fabulous results.

How do you build your RC?

I received an email earlier this week asking for my help to bring some visibility to the short video I’ve embedded below. When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the St. Vincent Medical Center, as well as offering free mammograms. All of this is part of a campaign to promote breast cancer awareness.

So after reading the rest of this post, please take 3 minutes to watch the video. You’ll both make a difference and have some fun at the same time. Feel free to use the ReTweet button here as well.

As far as Social Networking goes, this is a great example of it’s power. One of the things I love about Social Networking is experiencing the way networks work. A contact who lives in Minnesota whom I originally met on LinkedIn sent me the email. Our relationship has been growing and we’re at the stage where we are both helping each other. I’ve built enough trust with her that I’m willing to help her with this project. In the process I’m also able to indirectly help a whole bunch of others as well.

The skeptic out there will be saying – “that’s all great, but how does it help you generate more business?” The answer is a combination of facts and faith.

The fact is that I’m building Social Capital. Social Capital is a new kind of currency that you earn when you help others achieve their goals. When you do that, it is the equivalent of putting money into a savings account to be spent at a later date. By helping my contact, she is now much more likely to want to help me in return. Why? This is human nature. Do this hundreds or thousands of times with enough people and you can be building huge reserves of Social Capital. With these kind of reserves you can easily have people helping you earn more money.

The faith part is connected to the law of reciprocity. You get back what you put out there. Some people call it Karma. Whatever it’s name, you must have faith that it will work. Interestingly enough, this is a circular rather than a linear process. What I mean by this is that sometimes the reciprocity doesn’t come directly from the person(s) you originally helped. It comes from seemingly “out of nowhere.” Personally I have experienced many instances where help has come my way “out of nowhere.” Some people call it luck. I choose to attribute this to the law of reciprocity. That’s where faith comes in.

So please enjoy the video and earn a bit of Social Capital in the process.

One of the three pillars of building an effective Social Networking strategy is increasing your credibility. When people trust you they will listen to you. So I’m always looking for ways to increase my credibility online.

ReallyWho.com can help you increase your credibility online. They have a pretty slick system that allows them to verify that you are indeed a real person with a real physical address. This greatly reduces the chances that spammers would use their service – since the last thing that they want is for people online to know their real name and/or location. As you can see from my picture below, they add a verify banner to your image that you can then place on your Social Media sites to increase people’s trust in you.

Remember that trust and credibility are built over time and in little increments. This is one step that will help you. I highly encourage that you at least check them out.

Social Networking is all about building relationships. The way you build relationships is by using the VCP model – Visibility, Credibility & Profitability. You build Visibility over the long term by being consistently present. You build Credibility by consistently offering valuable items to others.

If you are going to succeed in Social Networking, you must be a giver first. So you must have a strategy for giving. Whether it is information, access, entertainment, joy, etc. you must consistently focus on giving something of value away. When you do this, people will notice and they will begin to engage in conversations with you. If you respond appropriately,these conversations will continue. And after they continue for a while, some of these conversations will turn into business for you.

Remember: there are no magic pills. There are no shortcuts. Slow and steady wins the race.

I originally met Paul Clegg online through ecademy.com. Paul lives in the U.K. while I live in San Diego, CA. When I first connected with him we exchanged a couple messages but nothing much came of our initial connection.

A few weeks ago my company had a Sponsor’s booth at the BNI International conference in Long Beach CA. While manning the booth, this gentleman approaches my booth and says – “Hi Rick, I’m Paul Clegg and we originally met on ecademy.” I really had no idea that he was involved with BNI so meeting him there was a big surprise. Though it was the first time I “really” met him, it felt like I was reconnecting with an old friend.

For the next several days, Paul and I had some great interactions. He proceeded to send many people to our booth and was instrumental in us completing several sales offering his testimonial about how much he enjoyed receiving QuoteActions. When we parted company, he had become a QuoteActions sender and we had agreed to stay in touch and look for opportunities to collaborate.

Today I received this personalized Send Out Card from Paul. Inside of the card he congratulated me for making the playoffs with my baseball team – something I had twitted about last week. Remember that Paul is from the U.K. where they don’t follow baseball!

The reason I’m sharing this with you, is because Paul embodies what Social Networking is all about – starting, building & continuing relationships. He is a master networker that combines online and offline networking methods in an exceptional manner. He understands what it takes to build and continue relationships. The fact he was paying attention to what I was sharing from my personal life and took the time to acknowledge it by sending me a card is so remarkable that here I am sharing about it and telling the whole world about it.

Please visit his blog and connect with him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/paulclegg

I received the message below in response to a connection request on LinkedIn:

Hello Rick – I’ve always been torn about whether or not to link with someone I don’t know. It seems to defeat the purpose – to refer or introduce you to others in my network. Just yesterday I called a friend to ask about someone in her network and she said she didn’t know the person. That makes the connection useless, don’t you think?

I believe this person’s perspective is quite common. She found my response useful and so may you. Would love to hear your comments.

Jim (not his real name),

I fully understand your feelings. When I first started using LinkedIn and other Social Networking sites, my approach was to only accept invitations from people I knew personally. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who have hundreds or thousands of meaningless connections.

I then started realizing that with this approach, my networking was going to be extremely limited – and mostly useless. This is because I would be networking with people I was already networking with. Not a lot of growth potential there.

Back then, I also started doing some article writing. Whenever people commented on my articles, I would write them an email thanking them. This led me to having conversations with many of these folks. And before long I started adding those people to my network.

Social Networking is all about relationships. However, the value of our network is based on both the QUALITY (depth) and the QUANTITY (reach) of our relationships. It is not an “either/or” but rather a “both/and” proposition.

While you and I don’t know each other, we do share several things in common. We are connected to some individuals we both know, we are both in BNI, we participate on LinkedIn and we belong to some of the same LinkedIn groups. That’s a good start to our relationship.

Now we’re having a conversation (albeit by email.) Who knows where this will lead? However, if you fail to accept my invitation, it will certainly lead nowhere.

Does that mean I personally know every person my network? No, it doesn’t. However everyone in my network has the potential to contribute something to someone else in my network. Take you for example, you have knowledge in Reverse Mortgages, something about which I know very little. If someone in my network were to ask me for a question or recommendation in this area, I wouldn’t hesitate to tap into your expertise. I might contact you asking you for information or I may offer your name to my contact and have them contact you directly, etc.

Bottom line, Social Networking is about a mindset. If you are connecting with people for the exclusive purpose of “what can I get?” then numbers are quite useless. However, if your purpose for growing your network is so that you can offer more opportunities to “give” then numbers do matter.

Thanks to Nate Kievman I just learned how to add a Video Profile to LinkedIn. To see how it is integrated on my LinkedIn profile, go to my profile on LinkedIn.  Be sure to click on the view full profile. If you do, be sure to drop me a note.

I’ve written before about the Visibility, Credibility & Profitability (VCP) process in Social Networking. Simply put, to make Social Networking work for you, people first need to know who you are (Visibility.) Then they need to trust that you are genuine and that you will add value to them (Credibility.) Only when these two stages are met, people will be willing to give you their direct or referral business.

Earlier today I sent a message to my network contacts in Ecademy.com about my latest article published on The National Networker. Ecademy is a Social Networking site that is very big in Europe and is gaining a lot of momentum in the US.  I have met some very friendly and valuable contacts there. One of the reasons I joined was because I saw an interview with Ecademy’s Chairman, Thomas Power, where he spoke about his reasons for starting Ecademy and also his values about networking.

Thomas Power happens to be one of my contacts. In fact, he was the first person who invited me to be part of his network when I joined. My assumption is that he invites EVERY new Ecademy member to join his network. While this is a nice touch, there isn’t anything particularly noteworthy about it. It is just a sound business strategy.

However here’s the part that IS noteworthy: he actually responded to my message! With nearly 53,000 contacts, I find it very impressive that he took the time to respond to my request. That shows the man is walking his talk. With so few people nowadays doing this, it is refreshing to find out that people who run large organizations, still understand the value of a personal connection. With this simple human touch, he won my loyalty.

If you have yet to discover Ecademy, I encourage you to sign up. Membership is free and well worth it. Plus you will probably have Thomas in your network as a result!

All you really need to do is be interested in people. Forget about “networking”.  Please read Stephanie Booth’s short post on the subject of building a network.

It’s been a while since I last posted. A lot has been going on since my last post and yet much of it relates to Social Networking.

I am now a featured columnist with The National Networker (TNNW), a fabulous resource for networking both online and offline. I became a columnist as a result of having met someone on Biznik, who referred me to Adam Kovitz and Douglas Castle. This is very exciting because it offers me a lot of exposure as well as meeting other very interesting folks.

We are in the process of licensing QuoteActions to be brought to France and The Netherlands. Jos Essers is my contact in the Netherlands and I met him through Ecademy.

I also met a gentleman through Twitter who lives in Mexico and he is very interested in bringing QuoteActions there.

For those of you who are wondering whether Social Networking works for business or not, I have proof that it does. The World has definitely gotten smaller and Social Networking is the way to take advantage of this shift.