Social Capital Pt. 3: Doing Your Homework

Jay Singh
Jay Singh
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

The motivation for writing this blog is to shed some light on the learnings I have had over the past few years. Many of my closest friends have been asking me the method/structure to reaching out to people and creating positive relationships. Note that I am not at all stating that I am an expert at this, all of this information has been learned through reading books, listening to podcasts, and experimenting with many of the techniques below. My goal is to share these experiences with the hope to encourage you to get out there and start building your own social capital!

Doing your homework

By now you should understand why doing your homework is important prior to reaching out. You can learn a lot from simply searching for people online, so don’t ask them questions that you could easily find yourself — that’s a quick way to show that you’re not really paying as much attention as you should, so please do your homework.

Here are a few specific things I do before reaching out:

  • LinkedIn: Follow company profiles, read through their content, see what they’re up to in their market.
  • Read up on the market itself. Interested in going into FinTech? Probably would help to read a report on FinTech trends this past year.
  • Go to the “Google News” tab and see if anything recent has happened (new partnerships, deals, organizational changes are all interesting things to ask about).
  • Read through blogs of people within the company.
  • Go on YouTube and watch videos of other leaders in the industry. Watch the videos you think they would be watching, and that way you can add some valuable insight on what you’ve learned on his/her industry.

Asking questions that you cannot easily find online means that you have been thoughtful with your research, and really do want to learn about the person.

Before meeting with a leader in the tech community this past year, I learned that she had written her PhD thesis on a topic I was quite interested in. I put away 10–20 minutes out of my day to read through her paper, jot down some notes I found interesting, then when we met, I asked her specific questions that I knew I could not find online. Thankfully the bar is set quite low for us, and doing this amount of homework will not only make you appear more prepared for your meeting, but will allow you to get much deeper and learn more insightful information from the person you’re chatting with!

Quick tips for your LinkedIn profile

Also this should go without saying, but make your social media look good.

  • Update your LinkedIn profile so its all up to date.
  • Put up a nice professional picture in your profile.
  • Write up a killer summary of yourself and what you’re about in the summary section.
  • Make sure all of your experiences are listed.
  • Put the organizations and clubs you’re affiliated with (this is later where 1st and 2nd connections will come into play).
  • Personalize your LinkedIn URL.
  • Start sharing valuable content (hopefully this blog is one of those!)
  • Once you start meeting people, connect with them asap and send them a personal note of something that interests you about their profile. “I saw on your profile that you went to UBC Sauder, I’m a student there right now!”
  • Display any relevant experiences, talks, blog posts you’ve been a part of in your experiences sections (see below).

For some more tips refer to the links below on how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out.

Key Takeaways

If you take any specific items from this post, these should be it:

  • Do your homework.
  • Do some more homework!
  • Make your LinkedIn profile awesome.

Next week we’ll go into even more detail on “How do I find people to connect with” where we’ll go even deeper into the wonderful powers of our dear friend LinkedIn. :)

Resources

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