I Am Not a Number!

Segment your database.

Store information that will allow you to easily send messages to small groups of people:

• All the people in a city you are going to visit ("Hi, I'm going to be in NYC next week and would love to see you if you have some time free.")
• Everyone who shares a particular personal interest of yours ("I saw this article in Fast Company. I thought you might be interested in.")
• People of a particular political, religious, or ethnic affiliation ("Happy St. Patrick's Day!")

Customize your social networking invitations.
Even with the new choices, tweak the default text to make it personal. Even better, segment your invitations. For example, send one invitation to people in your executive club saying, "I know we have the directory for connecting with each other, but by joining this site, we can help each other even better by leveraging our extended relationships."

Write every group message as if you were writing it to just one person.
This is a great lesson from the Internet marketing gurus. An email from Mark Joyner will have you convinced that he really is personally expecting to see you at the next big Internet marketing convention. Think of one person in the group you're writing to, and write the email as if it were just to them.

Review everything by hand before it goes out.
Automated data will do wacky (and often embarrassing) things. Scott recently received a contact update request from a close friend that showed his name as "Scott Guide", because Scott's About.com email account has his name listed as "Scott Allen, About.com Entrepreneurs Guide". Or you may accidentally send a message that says "I haven't seen you in a while" to someone you just saw yesterday. If you set your mail merge to not automatically send, you can go through and tweak individual messages to fit the particular situation.

Don't send automated contact update requests.
Instead, send a personal update message with a contact update request incidental to it. Consider the possibilities:

• The contact info you have is correct, in which case it's a pointless nuisance to ask them for an update.
• Their email is inaccurate, in which case you're not reaching them anyway.
• Their email is accurate, but the other info you have isn't. In this case, you can reach them via email, and if you need their phone number, you can probably track it down.

A better approach is just to send out a personal update once or twice a year -- what's going on in your personal life, maybe a business highlight or two, and ask them to send you their updated info in reply.

You'll notice that this approach requires you to get a fair amount of information about the people in your network, as well as some time to manage it effectively. If you're trying to create an anonymous mailing list, there are ways to do that, but that's not how you build strong one-on-one relationships. If you want more than 150 strong relationships, you have to make sure you don't make them feel like a number.

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