Things worth remembering...

• Treat your social media connections like they’re standing right in front of you
• ‘Old School’ business philosophies still apply – remember them and use them
• Spend time developing your LinkedIn profile and use it to point to your websites and blogs
• Build your Recommendations section
• When networking, introduce yourself and then ask what other folks are about
• Pay It Forward - help people out without the thought of return

More with… Chuck Hester

Sometimes there’s just too much of a good thing! Read on and learn more from my conversations with A @W guests.

Deb: Interesting side story…Chuck got his current job via LinkedIn. He connected with Ryan Allis, the CEO of iContact, and his current boss, and they had a chance to meet.

Chuck: I walked in the room and sat down with him across the conference table. He only had two pieces of paper and that was the two page profile from LinkedIn. He didn’t have my résumé; he basically knew what he wanted to see through my profile. I had my résumé available and ready, but he didn’t want to see it. He was just comfortable with talking one on one and he figured he knew enough information from the profile.

Deb: The Answers section on LinkedIn makes searching for services, products and solutions a much easier process, because you can ‘tap into’ your network.

Chuck: I’m going to give you a feel on a more personal level, when we were ready to re-finance our house, we did about two or three months ago, I put out a question and asked for good recommendations for refi companies. Came back with 25 some odd different recommendations, culled through the ones that made sense and in the process we were able to re-finance the house with somebody we trusted because it was a trusted contact of somebody we knew.

Deb: Pay it Forward is the cornerstone of Chuck’s life. He has personally been the recipient of its benefits and makes it a point to ‘pay it forward’ whenever he can.

Chuck: We went through some pretty cool consulting things that we were doing, I was a PR consultant, she was a HR consultant. We formed the Hester Group, it was going very well and then 9/11 and 2001 hit and at the same time, the dot com bubble hit and basically we pretty much lost almost everything. We had to rent the house as opposed to own it, and decided that we really needed to move out and relocate. We relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina. And in the process of, we ran across a lot of folks who can solidify what we call the ‘pay it forward’ lifestyle. For instance, a college friend who I had not seen for 20 years, was in the Raleigh area and said, “Hey, you know what, come and stay with us for a week, not a problem, bring your whole family and we’ll put you up while you try to find some place to live.” That type of thing really struck a cord with both Stephanie and I, to the point where it really made sense.

A@W Blog entry about Chuck Hester and Pay It Forward