It was my birthday last month and it was going to be quite a low-key affair until I arrived home on Friday evening to find Sue had arranged a surprise party for me at our house. Fun.
What wasn’t fun (and I’m genuinely NOT being grumpy here – please read to the end of this article before forming judgement!) was dealing with my inbox on my birthday and the day after.
It turns out 268 people sent me a Happy Birthday message via LinkedIn.
Now, at one level, this is very nice BUT, the vast majority of the 268 people are, at best, passing acquaintances and, in many cases, if I’m honest, I didn’t even know who they were.
This isn’t about me, I promise, it’s about them.
Pause for a moment and contemplate what they were hoping to achieve by spending time (okay, I know it won’t have taken them very long but it did take some time and if they’re doing it for me, they’re probably doing it to other people as well) sending these very superficial birthday messages.
Only one person out of the 268 (yes, I did read them all – I deserve a medal!) said something other than the normal ‘happy birthday, hope you have a great day, many happy returns’. So, what we have here are apparently smart individuals, most of them business owners, taking time out of their day to send what they hope will be perceived as a personal message to someone whose birthday it is that day.
So far, so good. BUT that’s not how their message is received is it.
First of all, they were one of 267 – not great odds to get attention because they’ve sent the message on the same day as everybody else.
They’ve then compounded things by sending exactly the same message.
Am I making sense here? This is a bonkers strategy and it’s one used by the same sort of people who profess that they’re too busy to do the right things that will move their business forward to where it wants to be this year.
They’re the same people who are doing stuff on social media because it’s their shiny new thing and everyone else is doing it when, perversely, the smartest course of action if you want to send somebody birthday greetings – and it really matters to you – is to send them a good old fashioned card.
You see, I got 17 birthday cards from members of the Entrepreneur’s Circle – and every single one of them was genuinely, properly appreciated. And not just because they sent a card – because, unlike the lemmings on LinkedIn, the people who sent the cards ALL, without exception, wrote something more personal/more meaningful/more interesting/more humorous, in the cards.
They all got on my radar.
Now, as I said at the beginning, this is NOT ABOUT ME. I’m simply using my birthday as a conduit to an extremely important lesson here. You cannot do the same as everyone else – unless, of course, you want to be in the same place as everyone else.
If you aspire to super-success then you simply have to think a little bit more deeply and do the right things at the right time.
Much better for you and your business for you to send 12 people a birthday card through the post than to send 1,200 people an automated message via LinkedIn. The 1,188 who miss out won’t notice.
I promise you!
