Through my online and offline activities, a lot of people have begun to hear about me. Some of them find my blogs useful, maybe they think my tweets are funny, perhaps they were in the audience at an event I spoke at. I really appreciate hearing positive, and even negative, feedback from this audience. One interesting development is that now with me traveling more, with an audience spread all over the place, a lot of people say things like, “When are you going to visit Miami/Nashville/Minneapolis/Portland/Boston/etc.?”

Well, be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. Something I’ve noticed is when I do actually visit one of these places (that I might only visit once every two years or something) is that some people hustle to meet me, and some people don’t. I try REALLY hard to reach out to people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and phone to tell them when I’ll be in town, where I’ll be, and when I’m available and what I’m thinking. It’s a hustle. I try to pack tons of engagements and activations into a trip (people who have seen me dashing around Manhattan know this well).

Back to the hustle; it goes both ways. It’s illegit to feign wanting to meet me very badly, and then not hustle to make it happen when I’m in your city for two or three days. It gives me a bad impression of you, if I haven’t met you previously. Everyone is busy, no doubt – but if you’re the kind of person to take 15 minutes and meet me in the hotel lobby for a cup of coffee, you’re making that BIG impression on me. And if you have this thing on Thursday and that other thing on Friday and you’re busy on Saturday…yeah, that doesn’t impress me. You can’t say you badly want to meet me when I’m in town and then not make it happen.

I try to meet everyone who wants to meet me, within reason. But it goes both ways. Want to make a GREAT impression in real life? Hustle. You can only do so much from behind a keyboard.

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous