Fostering Personal Relationships Online To Improve Business Success

In business (as in life, too) when you make a personal contact with people, it makes it much more difficult for them to ignore you, or more importantly, treat you badly. Wherever possible in life, personalize your relationships.  Many (if not all) of my real life friends are on Facebook.  And why not?  It’s convenient, centralized and most of all, easy!  They have yet to do any empirical research on the long-term effects of Facebook, but my feeling is, it does not facilitate honest, personal relationships with all of those people on your list of friends.  I’ve read somewhere and don’t quote me on this, but the human mind can only handle up to 50 or so friends, the rest are just strangers.   While you may have shared a response to someone’s Status Update, or pressed the “Like” button on a discussion among your social network, the vast majority of the interactions on Facebook is analogous to making eye contact with strangers on an elevator!

Now, I know that’s harsh, especially if you’re the one with over 1000 “friends” on Facebook!  I’m simply stating a point, and that is, any relationship you can make more personal improves your chances of success.   Whether that’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, or, dare I say it, Myspace, the connections you make have intrinsic and market value.  You may not do business with the vast majority of your connections due to a variety of reasons, but the real value is in grassroots marketing.  Your direct connection may not have a need your products or services right now, but they may know someone who does. 

I can only speak for myself and the Financial Services industry when doing business with someone online.  If you do a Google search, you’ll find that this industry is saturated with potential Financial Professionals in your area and deciding which one to go hire can be a daunting task.   So, try to do business with someone who has a classic type A, obsessive-compulsive personality.  These people need to be adored (or at least needed).  Because of this, they tend to kill you with personal service and attention.  They really want your portfolio to work-because of their ego, not yours. 

And since what you really want is not some hobo who makes a killing from selling you commission-based mutual funds but a strategy to set you free financially, here are some questions to ask anyone who presumes to handle your money. 

• Do you know anything about history, art, or literature?  It is my personal prejudice that anyone who watches my money should know a lot about the past, about human nature.  Good money management is more about understanding emotion that it is about quantitative analysis.  Your money manager should be working with both sides of his or her brain.
• What is your philosophy of investing?  Make sure that whoever is going to watch your nest egg can articulate what he or she believes in-in simple, easy language.  If you cannot explain what your broker or investment advisor believes in, you shouldn’t be investing with that person.  Also, personal money managers should have their investing philosophy in plain sight (business cards, front page of their website, etc…).
• Do you own stock yourself?  (You’d be amazed how many financial consultants own no securities themselves).  Ask what the broker or investment advisor currently owns and what he or she has learned from the successes and failures.  If they haven’t failed, they haven’t tried, so steer clear from them.