Keith Ferrazzi · Strategic Networking Expert

Throwing a holiday party can transform your experience of the season. It’s hard to be a Scrooge while creating an evening to remember – and then enjoying it with happy, heart-warmed guests.

Nervous about your hosting skills? Relief is here: Check out our new FREE Holiday Party Guide. Advice, tactical cues, cost-cutters, as well as instant motivation to create events that truly capture the incredible relationship-building opportunity of the season. With a little planning, you can invite casual acquaintances into your home and …

Every email you write is an opportunity to strengthen a relationship.

If, in the grind of daily business, you’re wasting that opportunity, you’re making a huge mistake.

Email has become a primary means of communication inside companies and across divisions – sometimes even just across a cube division! Are you going to wait for a face-to-face, or until you’re sauced at the Christmas party to be kind and conversational, and talk to someone besides the guy at the desk next to you? No!

Here are 7 tips to maximize relationship development – and ultimately, team performance – in your intra…

A common reaction I get when I teach people my relationship building system is, “My schedule’s killing me! And now you want me to fit in all these pings and calls and meetings and dinners and…?”

Here are my favorite tips for making all those important relationship building activities fit inside the schedule you already have – no add-ons!

1. Blend Not Balance. Blend your personal and professional life, rather than trying to keep them in separate worlds. Don’t be afraid to mix friends with colleagues and associates during evening and weekend socializing.

2. Clone meetings. Don’t mak…

It takes barely fifteen seconds to put into practice my four rules for what I call “warm calling” – a friendlier way to engage someone you’ve never met, i.e. the traditional “cold call.” These rules apply to both live calls and voicemails – or even in person.

Hit the points below and you’ll give yourself the best shot at getting the meeting or follow up you seek.

1) Convey credibility by mentioning a familiar person or institution that connects you. If you don’t have one – find one!

2) State your value proposition: How will interacting with you help this person?

3) *Impart urgen…

“Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step.” – Jim Collins

People constantly ask me, “What do I have to offer?” I especially hear this from young people who are looking to approach more senior players. But among both young and old, there are so many people who’ve yet to discover their unique selling proposition (USP) – that “secret sauce” that can open doors to new contacts. We all have one, sometimes many. It’s up to each of us to identify and develop it.

Your USP might be an expertise, a hobby, or even an inter…

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. – Charles Anderson Dana

You must manage your own media. Yes, a PR firm can help you generate those contacts, but early in your career you won’t need them and you probably won’t be able to afford them.

Who better than you to tell your story with credibility and passion? Start making calls to the reporters who cover your industry. Have lunch with them. Create and send press releases. Remember, media folks need you as much …

The image is one thing and the human being is another. – Elvis Presley

Fame breeds fame. The fact is, all my prowess for reaching out to other people would be far less effective if a few of those people in my Rolodex weren’t well-known names. Problem is, while we’re excited by the idea of meeting “celebrities,” they are often not all that anxious to meet us. So how can we get close to them?

Yes, it helps to be at the right places and invited to the right events. But the fancy weekends and invite-only conferences aren’t the only ways to meet important people. In America, there is an asso…

Recently I received an advanced copy of The Leap, a thought-provoking and inspiring new book by my friend Rick Smith. I met Rick through his work with World 50, the uber-influential executive networking company he founded a few years back.

The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get …