Andrew Hennigan's Blog

For a decade personal "reputation management" has mostly meant online reputation. People have been creating online content with the aim of appearing more visible in search engines like Google, usually with some success. I have written myself about this in posts like Five Simple Steps To Improve Your Online Reputation . But now changes in search technology mean that in a few years the text search as we know it, basically unchanged since the 1990s, will be replaced by alternatives that are less easy to manage, bringing n a new age of "deep" or "fundamental" reputation management. You see this trend already when you search for famous people, companies and so on. Google puts an answer box on the right, next to the search results. Their aim is to give you the answer to your question, not just a list of possible sources. In part this shift is driven by technology -- it couldn't be done in 1998 when Google started -- and partly by the shift to mobile dev...

Since this was written LinkedIn has changed the site again so this post is now moot. For the latest on this topic see How to Personalize LinkedIn Connection Requests of 2 February 2015. For many years I have been telling everyone who attends my networking and influencing workshops that you should always personalize the message in LinkedIn connection requests.  This is one of the tips in my post LinkedIn Etiquette: How to Approach People You Don't Know . Personalizing messages is important because it shows that your request is personal -- that you didn't just send out a mass connection request blindly to all of your contacts. It is also an opportunity for you to remind me how we know each other, or why we should connect. But updates to LinkedIn are making it harder and harder to personalize your invitation as the old forms are replaced with quick CONNECT buttons that often don't allow messages to be personalized. LinkedIn's quick connect button that often ...

Even in the age of online networking you can't beat face-to-face meetings for meeting and building relationships with strangers. But for many people a networking event can be an intimidating experience: One of the most common questions I hear in networking workshops is how you deal with this problem. Like other skills, face-to-face networking is a learnable skill and anyone can do it with practice, but there are a few tips and techniques you can use to make it easier, especially at the beginning while you build up confidence. Here are three of them: 1. ARRIVE EARLY . If you have time to learn only one thing it should be this: if you are not comfortable about face-to-face events always arrive early. If you arrive an hour later the crowd has already coalesced into tightly-bound mingling groups that are difficult to penetrate. If you are the first to arrive then the second person has to talk to you, then the third joins you and so on. If you are lucky some of the early birds ar...