The Corruptors of Networking

Why do so many people hate networking so much?

🤝Networking is about building relationships, sharing resources, helping people, finding support, building a community. 🤝

Who could hate that?

We hate networking because the concept of networking has been Corrupted.

REAL Networking is about collaboration, relationships, and communities.

But Corrupted Networking is about elevator pitches, prospects, leads, sales, and predatory tactics.

If something is corrupted, then someone corrupted it, and I have come up with 5 archetypes of networking Corruptors, which I then asked DALL-E to draw for me. (I’m not sure which one is which in the picture)

👿 Meet The Corruptors 👿

🤑 The Sales Manager – This is the sales manager or trainer who thinks relationship building is a buzzword for slacking off. They ask you how many leads you found at that networking event and when you’ll be closing them, pushing you to make everything transactional.

📢 The Marketer – You can’t sell networking like you can sell ads, but if you are a great networker, you don’t need to buy ads. So The Marketer teaches you that networking doesn’t work and you better buy more of their amazing social media strategy. They push you to measure immediate direct response ROI and forget about relationships.

💻 The Automator – Networking is too slow, and inefficient. The Automator will use technology to allow you to get more leads and prospects from networking: scraping chat logs, automating LinkedIn outreach, chatbots for conversations. Why waste time talking to all those people, when the bots can do the work for you?

😵 The Fool – They’ve been to so many networking events and never got anything out of it. Their failure is proof that networking doesn’t work, and they don’t want you to prove them wrong, so they convince you networking doesn’t work.

😈 The Taker – This person has done well doing networking they wrong way. They go into networking spaces and sell the crap out of them. Their aggressive style doesn’t make them any friends, but it makes them money. Short term, at least, but they build sales, not a business.

Who is missing from this list?

What archetypes of bad networkers and bad networking influences should I include in The Corruptors.

More importantly, who would like to join me in pushing back to teach REAL Networking and to put the Corruptors back in their box?

Let’s take back “Networking”

For decades, people have been listening to the Corruptors about what networking is.

It’s time to take it back.

It’s time to learn what networking really is, all the benefits that can come from it, and how easy it can really be.