
Ask HN: Stay in touch with professional friends or former colleagues - recmend
How do you keep your important professional relationships alive? What tools do you use, if any?<p>If you&#x27;re failing to keep in touch, what can we do to fix that?
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jeffwass
LinkedIn.

I'm not on Facebook or any other social networks.

LinkedIn is basically like a Rolodex of friends and colleagues that
automatically keeps updated. So it's useful to query, for example, who in your
network works at a particular company now. And then you find out that guy from
college who you hung out with a few times but otherwise never would have kept
directly in touch with, is now a senior manager there.

The regular network updates can be interesting, to see who's gotten promoted
or moved on to new positions.

I don't do any of the socially networky things on it, though occasionally read
what some people postings.

Regarding keeping in touch, you can contact people via the internal messaging
feature, though most of my contacts also have their email address visible for
their connections, so I mostly email people as needed.

I'm in the financial industry now, after finishing a PhD in physics. And via
LinkedIn, for example, I've been contacted by the dean of the business school
at my university (even though I was never involved with the biz school in any
way at uni) who was visiting London to invite me to an event he was speaking
at. I've had students I don't know from my uni, or friends of friends, reach
out to me to ask questions about what it's like moving to finance, advice for
getting jobs, etc.

~~~
recmend
Got it. You use Linkedin when you need to find someone in your network that
works at a given company, so your interactions are more of a need base than
casual social conversations?

~~~
jeffwass
Your posting specifically mentioned professional relationships and not 'casual
social conversations', and professional connectivity is the key focus of
LinkedIn. Though I keep my friends as contacts here too.

I do contact people casually and socially via either the messaging app or
email periodically. It's not just for finding out who works at companies,
although that's a handy feature. For me it's really more of a Rolodex of
resumes and contact info that is kept up to date.

For example, I wouldn't care about reading all my colleagues daily Facebook or
Twitter feeds of yet another picture of them on a beach or about to eat some
fancy entree. (As mentioned, I'm not on Facebook).

But it's useful to see the regular LinkedIn updates of who's moved to new
positions. And some people have written some interesting posts as well.

------
freestockoption
I try to add them to my LinkedIn or Facebook. When I move to a new job or
accomplish something (e.g. new product, etc) I send an email (bcc). This
usually gets the people who want to keep in touch to respond. Then we go back
and forth updating each other.

~~~
recmend
I had a similar workflow but then I realized the communication was mostly done
on a need basis. If you've to define your ideal workflow for keeping in touch,
what would that look like?

~~~
freestockoption
I feel the most important thing is keeping a conversation going. So I try to
have back-and-forth questions.

I'm torn if face-to-face interactions help significantly. Although, if I see
someone enough in an unstructured way, I'll either become good friends or want
to not see each other again. :)

Facebook is great for keeping in touch in a casual way. Ask questions here and
there, comment on their life achievements, etc.

I've noticed that once I got more of my professional network on Facebook, I've
been more conscious about posting drama, this-is-how-it-should-be opinions,
etc. That's a good thing but man was it hard at the beginning to keep myself
from posting rants!!! :D

~~~
recmend
haha. Totally agree with keeping an active communication. Without
communication, those relationships tend to grow cold and slowly die.

~~~
freestockoption
Funny thing I realized not too long ago is that everyone has a different idea
of what it means when they say "I know this person." I used to think sales
people were well connected (and I'm sure they are), but when a sales person
says they know someone, it probably means they met at a bar somewhere at least
once. :)

For myself, it would be hard for me to say I know them, let alone call them
up. Maybe the lesson for myself is that most people are pretty receptive of
just being called up if you have a legitimate reason and there's no harm in
being more open about connecting (you won't get in trouble for calling someone
a friend even though they are definition an acquaintance).

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chatmasta
I would rather someone only talk to me when he needs something, rather than
sporadically wasting my time by engaging in useless platitudes, when neither
of us actually want to.

If every acquaintance "touched base" with me "once-per-X", I would have a
limited number of acquantainces.

Don't pretend to be friends with people by bothering them, unless you actually
need something, and even then, preferably try to make it mutually beneficial.

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exolymph
If I had a system to organize this, here's what it would be:

1) Add all new professional contacts to a Google Doc along with the date of
the last time I spoke to them, with the most recent contact dates at the
bottom.

2) Contact one person every week or [insert appropriate time interval].

3) Move the person I just contacted to the bottom of the list.

4) Rinse and repeat.

But instead of doing that I just have Twitter and a dash of Facebook. People
pop up in my feed and I interact with them on the fly.

~~~
curuinor
I've done this with custom tools for a few years. Works pretty well.

~~~
recmend
do you mind sharing your workflow / tools?

------
recmend
Thinking of taking a stab at this problem. Now taking feedback on
www.meetnucleus.com.

------
tmaly
I usually send a text or an email once in a while just to ask how they are
doing.

~~~
recmend
Do you use some tools to help you remember or you've a memory of an elephant
:) Also, how do you choose between text or email?

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cableshaft
Hey, some verification that there's at least a little demand for an app I'm
working on in my spare time. Without going too much into it, it lets you keep
track of how often and how long ago you've done things. Maybe I should kick it
up a notch and get an MVP out there.

~~~
tmaly
I would recommend keeping it super simple. Some of these concepts are built
into much more complex systems like Salesforce. This is a key idea of people
working sales or recruiters.

~~~
cableshaft
The plan is to keep it simple, otherwise I'll never get it out there :P But I
personally find the data and its presentation interesting and a useful memory
aid, so I was hoping other people would also.

I doubt Salesforce has something as general-purpose as I have in mind. My
concept isn't exclusively for tracking interactions with people and can be
used for pretty much anything you can describe with text.

My life has been a bit too eventful recently, though. It's tough to find the
time to work on it.

