As a professional ghost blogger, I’ve taken my “one giant step” into the digital world.  But entering my fourth decade as a denizen of the business world, I find face-to-face encounters are still my favorite flavor. The other day I had a delightful personal encounter with none other than the encounter empress herself, Susan RoAne.  Here from California to speak at the annual gala of the Network of Women in Business, RoAne was offering tips on memorable mingling and networking.  (In fact, her newest book, Face to Face: How To Reclaim The Personal Touch in a Digital World, comes out this week, and I’ll be in line purchasing my copy.)

Specializing in writing to market my clients’ businesses online, I may have been the only audience member to find so many parallels between blogging and RoAne’s hints about what she calls “memorable mingling”.  The process of mingling starts, she explained, by us getting over encounter reluctance. Shyness keeps many of us, at a party or business meeting, from approaching a “stranger”, making eye contact, and starting a conversation.  To shift our thinking, Susan had us picture a barn dance.  Just by virtue of having come to that barn in the first place, each person who was there obviously had some interest in dancing (or watching, or playing music for the dance) – there really were no “strangers”. As Susan put it – “The roof is your introduction!”

In Won’t You Please Come Into My Blog?, I likened the Internet to a big trade show.  Potential customers are milling around, looking for information or for a product or service.  They are at the trade show for a reason – they’re under the “roof”, and so, as Susan reminds us, they’re not “strangers” at all!  The very fact that searchers browsing on the Web have arrived at your blog “booth” means the encounter has already begun.  All you need to do is make eye contact and welcome them to your website.

In memorable mingling, sometimes you make the first move; other times someone approaches you.  With business blogging, you’ve made the first move and begun the process, literally “putting yourself out there”. The way the search engine process works, if you blog frequently, posting relevant, interesting content, and build “equity” by continuing the blogging, you’ll re be positioned to “win search”, with others coming up to you.  It’s simple – The blog “roof” is all the introduction you’ll need!

On my way to an appointment with one of my ghost blogging clients the other day, I heard a neat word tidbit on the radio. As a professional writer, I get special pleasure out of phrases that, in a very few words, make a big impact or that clarify a complicated concept.

This tidbit I was hearing on the radio was actually part of a commercial for, of all things, GM cars. The speaker was painting a scene, reminding us how, in years past, you’d go into a store to buy, say, a fine cigar or perhaps a fur coat. The proprietor, in order to make you feel you were a special customer whose business he prized, would have you wait a moment while he went to the back to get his very best merchandise.  That’s where the best stuff used to be kept, the announcer reminisced – the best was always in the back!

I don’t know about you – for all I know, you may be too young to remember small stores with “proprietors” who helped customers, trying to make each one feel he was getting a very special deal. Anyway, I am old enough, and that word picture really took me back in time to an era of small shops manned by their hardworking owners.

But, since I was on my way to a meeting to talk about a very modern form of marketing, namely blogging, I couldn’t help myself from drawing a parallel between the front and back of the cigar store described by the radio announcer and a business blog in relation to the business’  website.  In Enuf Is Enuf In Blogs, I explained that blog audiences are scanners, not readers.  A blog should offer just enough information to entice the searcher to visit your website to find out more about your products or services.  A blog needs to capture interest, yes, so that Internet browsers feel they’ve come to the right spot to get what they need, but remember –  keep your best stuff in the back!