Do Something With Your Marketing: Water and Weed

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, I want you to water and weed your social garden. What in the world am I talking about? One of the things that we have to keep an eye on is whether we are spending enough time on the human side of our personal and professional relationships. Now, one of the things that we want to avoid doing is uh so-called keeping score, where you know this person owes me a favor, or uh, and so uh I need to call that in, or I did this uh for a person and have an ex expectation of return. That's it's not the healthiest way to do it, although certainly if you're analytically minded and uh that's how your brain works, that's how your brain works.

No judgment. This comes to mind because I just brought in you can't see it on the camera here. Um I just brought in all of my plants for the winter time because I live in New England and it gets cold here. And some of these plants, like white sage, do not do well outdoors. So bring them in.

Uh deprive those plants of any one of those things and they will wither and die. Well, the same thing is true of our relationships with other humans. If they're important, if that sense of connection is important, then we need to do the same. And to water them, to provide them light, what uh nutrition, etc. And I like the analogy of it of a social garden because again, I have no expectation of return um from my plants, right?

I don't expect them to do anything for me. They're just kinda there. But I do want to keep them alive because if I don't, then you know they they they go away. And they are kind of nice to have around. So when we think about our interpersonal interactions with other people, we need to think about it in the same kind of way.

Not we don't want to expect return. But we do expect some kind of benefit from the association, and we need to work to keep them alive. So you need to water those things that you want to keep alive and do a little weeding too. There are some people that that relationship maybe isn't the best thing. So those are the ones that you don't water.

You weed them, ideally. If you don't weed them, just stop watering them, and they will eventually wither and die. Sounds very metaphysical. How do you do this? Well, we have these lovely devices, right?

This is everything you need. Open up your phone messages, your text messages, your social network of choice, your email, your address book on your device, look at it and go, Huh. I haven't talked to that person in a while, or huh, that person emailed me and I forgot to email them back. Or huh, I wonder how I wonder how that person's doing. And you look at the list and go, I maybe I should drop that person alive, just say hi, see how they're doing.

You know, I was looking through here, like I haven't messaged my friend Justin in a while. I should probably message just check in on him, see how he's doing. As you would water or weed your garden. And again, there's gonna be some people here, it's like I don't really want to talk to that person. Maybe that's a good opportunity to click that unfriend or unfollow button and you know, uh remove that from your garden so that you have room, mental room, mental space, mental time, emotional space, emotional time for that.

Why is this important? I'm urging you to do this now because when times are good, as they have been for at least five years, if not longer, it's easy to lose sight of those relationships, those interactions. When times are bad, you need that stuff, right? You can grow all sorts of food crops for fun when times are good, right? Think back to medieval times because we have grocery stores and things now.

In rough times, you absolutely need positively need to water and weed your fields because if you don't, you starve to death, right? The analogy applies metaphorically to our interpersonal relationships. When times are good, we need to invest so that when times are bad, we have a network to draw on. And I mentioned this because somebody reached out to me tonight saying, Hey, you know, I'm I'm looking for work. Like I I don't have any right now because we're a three-person company and are and a million robots, right?

But I have a network of people that I know, you if you're watching this video, you're in that, and maybe I have some I can connect this person to somebody else in the network. But if I didn't invest in you, if we weren't having this conversation together, I wouldn't be able to help this other person. And we all know with absolute certainty that rough times are ahead. When we're not sure, but we know for sure, good and bad, just the ongoing cycle. Nothing is good forever, nothing is bad forever.

But we want to invest while times are good, so that when times are bad, we have a safety net, and you need that, and so that's why the whole thing about the watering and weeding your social garden. Do that now. Do that today, over the next week or so, so that you're ready. Because whether it's a month, a year, five years, when the economy does turn, you want to make sure that you've got a safety net. Or you just have a change of heart.

You're like, you know what? I'm tired of this job. I want a new job. Who can I talk to? Let me think about this.

I have not applied for a job with a resume and a standard hiring process since 2003. Right? Everything since then has been built on interpersonal connections. When I moved to Blue Sky Factory, it was because I met and became friends with Greg Cangelosi at Blue Sky Factory. Right.

And that company got acquired and just transitioned. Then I met Todd Defren actually way back in 2006 at Podcamp Boston. And in 2012, I joined his company. And then obviously, uh I met my co-founder and CEO Katie Robert at uh Todd's shop, and we started our company together. So I haven't applied for a job in 16 years.

I want that for you. I want you to be in that position where you're not clicking on job applications on LinkedIn, right? You just ask your friends, you ask your network, I want to make this change. Can someone help me? And hopefully your network is robust enough, thanks to your c constant watering and weeding and investment in it, giving to it, that your network's like, oh yeah, we got this and this and this and and you reap that harvest when you need it.

So that's this week's do something with your marketing. And it's not just a this week thing. It's something to do every week. Put it on your calendar. You know, reach out, just check in on people, say hi, do those things so that you continue to grow.

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