SolveYourProblem Article Series: Networking
How To Successfully Network Yourself

How To Network when You're in a New City

Networking, both professional and personal, in a new city now centers around one precious tool: the Internet. The original context of the term ‘networking’ was that you use the people that you already know to get to new people that can be good contacts for you. This sort of networking usually took place at meetings, dinners, lunches and other in-person gatherings of people that work in a common field. At such an event, you might have a known contact introduce you to someone new in your field whose work you might have heard of and admired. The bottom line is that networking happened face-to-face, person-to-person.

While networking still happens, for the most part, person-to-person, it no longer is primarily face-to-face. The vast majority of networking, especially when settling into a new city, happens over the Internet. MySpace.com is an extreme example; MySpace is geared at very young people, but it still has a networking feature. Of course, a 16-year-old’s idea of networking is meeting cool people; the point is that networking happens nowadays by searching for people or for businesses that are of interest to you, for whatever reason, online.

When arriving in a new city, it is helpful to have prepared one’s arrival, to a certain extent, before actually arriving. It is always a good idea to have at least a few contacts, whether professional or personal, before you even arrive. This will not only give you connections in your new home, but it will also give you a greater sense of purpose as you attack all those boxes to be unpacked and possibly a foreign language to decipher. People who already have a few contacts prior to arrival tend to jump in running instead of having a series of false starts in their new city.

There are numerous websites that cater to just this purpose. There are national and international, not to mention regional, sites that offer everything from housing notices to job announcements with everything you could possibly imagine (and some things you can’t) found in between. The international sites even offer opportunities to find language partners with whom you can exchange your native English for the local language; this is a fun way to spend one lunch break a week, much less demanding and expensive than a formal course, and you get to interact with the locals.

The most important thing to remember as you prepare to move to a new city is that you are the one responsible for every aspect of your life. If you take a strong hold of the reins and decide to be assertive, you will find networking in your city of adoption to not only be possible and easy, but also to be enjoyable. It’s those people who sit quietly, waiting for connections to come to them that do not do well in a new city. Start searching the Internet months or weeks before you go and get your name or the name of your company out there. Not only will you be able to network this way, you will also help yourself (whether it be personally, or for your business, professionally) to keep yourself or your business thriving in your new city. It’s a global, mobile world, and people who are ready to capitalize on that fact are the ones who are embracing new cities and new regions.

Once you’ve gotten the ball rolling, you will find that the typical kind of networking kicks in. That is, after all, the beauty of networking; it has a snowball effect as it carries on. A small seed that you plant three months before arriving in your new city just might result in a complete tree just a year or two after arriving.

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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007

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