Oil Events: How to Scale Your Oil and Gas Networking Strategy

The Oil & Gas Digital Marketing Podcast

Reading Time: 4 minutes

“Oh, goodness. I’m stuck like this. Oil events is the keyword… somebody help!”

Do you have any LinkedIn or Facebook “friends” you’ve never met? When you’ve eventually met one or two of them, did you feel like you’d known them for years? When you do it right online, your prospects and customers feel the same way.

Here’s how to scale your oil events networking strategy and connect with old friends you’ve never met.

Scaled Networking at Oil Events Transcript

When you attend oil events, your network is your net worth.

If you listened to any of a first roughly 90 episodes Oil and Gas This Week, you probably heard me say that about 180 times. Because we all know it’s true.

Your network is your net worth. It’s all about who you know!

And you can complain about that. Or you can work with the system and get out there and get to know some people, and help some people get to know you.

So, let’s talk about oil events and how to scale your oil events networking strategy.

Offline Networking at Oil Events

First of all, let’s talk about the standard networking event. Whether it’s American Petroleum Institute, API meeting, or OTC…

Which, happy OTC Thursday, I believe…

Let’s just say you have roughly an hour. And in that hour, you meet five new people. At that point, you have to go back to the office, open your email, and start to set up a call. Or set a lunch meeting or something like that.

And then at that lunch meeting, you are starting from fresh. You don’t know each other from Adam. You don’t know anything about each other. The only thing you know is there might be some sort of fit. Either with your personalities, a good business-friend connection. Or with your businesses, being able to send deals back and forth.

That’s all well and good, there’s nothing wrong with that. Keep on doing it. And scale your relationship building at the same time.

Outbound Networking

Again, I’m gonna sound like a broken record because I say this all the time, but the beauty of the Internet is that you don’t have to physically go somewhere to make a connection. But, that’s not the only good thing about the Internet in this regard.

Not only are you able to make those connections digitally, but also it’s not an outbound activity like you’re doing at oil events. At oil events, you’re going out not only physically, but you’re also reaching out. You’re setting up appointments and it’s that struggle to start a relationship and get to know somebody.

Any time that you go to these places, you know you are not going to close any deals on the spot. As an industry, we know how long it takes to build a relationship.

Here’s the cool thing. You can shortcut all of that with scaled relationship building. With digital content you produce.

Old Friends Who’ve Never Met

Just an example, I mentioned Oil and Gas This Week, those first 90 episodes. When I go to the North American Prospects Expo or OTC, a lot of other time my calendar is full of people reaching out to me because they say they know me. Or they feel like they know me, I should say.

I’m sure you have people like that in your life, your digital life. People who you’re connected with on LinkedIn and Facebook “friends” you’ve never met. These days we all have at least one or two, maybe even a handful of people we think we are very much close with, we see them as good friends of ours, but we’ve never met in person.

That’s the beauty of doing digital content. Not only are you able to scale that out, but you’re also able to help people start to feel as if they have a real connection with you even if you’ve never had a back-and-forth dialogue.

The Psychology of Inbound

The way it works, psychologically speaking, is if you’re being authentic. If you’re being transparent. And if you’re sharing helpful, valuable, relevant content about your expertise and what you’re passionate about and what you bring to the marketplace. In a sense, you’re sharing a real part of yourself. Your business self. Which is a lot of the time, especially for us entrepreneurs and business owners.

Then, especially if it’s a podcast, people are sitting there with their earbuds in and you’re speaking directly into their brain. Directly into their brain. It’s an amazing thing! I’ve got tons of podcasts I listen to where I feel like I know the person when I go to a conference and finally meet them.

Again, don’t stop doing the offline networking. But think about what you can do with digital content so that you can start scaling your networking strategy.

I always have this Mr. Rohn quote behind me. Another one of my favorites of his is, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

In a digital world, you can insert yourself into the five people for every single person in your audience. People that connect with what you’re saying and what you’re doing. Because if you’re passionate about it, you’re going to attract people that are passionate about whatever it is that you do. Even if it’s the old tried-and-true example of rathole drilling or valve pressure stems.

Whatever it is, there are people out there looking to make connections with you. And you can go outbound and you can keep doing that, but at the same time, you can start drawing those people inbound. So when you meet up with them at OTC, or NAPE, or an API meeting, you pick up was like it’s right where you left off. Even though you’ve never met.

Call to Action

And that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I want to hear your beautiful, beautiful stories. Leave a comment below. Do you have any funny, interesting, or entertaining virtual friend stories?

Keep it clean, kids. Keep it clean!

Or if you think I’m way off base, you can go ahead and just bypass this whole message.

Regardless, I’ll wrap. Whatever you’re doing out there in oil and gas, I hope you go out there and consistently apply the basic fundamentals.

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