How do you keep your important professional relationships alive? What tools do you use, if any?<p>If you're failing to keep in touch, what can we do to fix that?
LinkedIn.<p>I'm not on Facebook or any other social networks.<p>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.<p>The regular network updates can be interesting, to see who's gotten promoted or moved on to new positions.<p>I don't do any of the socially networky things on it, though occasionally read what some people postings.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>If every acquaintance "touched base" with me "once-per-X", I would have a limited number of acquantainces.<p>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.
If I had a system to organize this, here's what it would be:<p>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.<p>2) Contact one person every week or [insert appropriate time interval].<p>3) Move the person I just contacted to the bottom of the list.<p>4) Rinse and repeat.<p>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.