How hard is it to introduce people? Isn’t that a skill we learned in elementary school? “Joan, this is Jim. Jim is an electrician with ABC Company; Joan owns a marketing company that specializes in working with new startups.” Simple. Now they know what the other does, have a warm introduction, and you’ve built a basis for further conversation. But recently, at a large event where I was in a small group of four, one of the people three of us knew walked up. No one bothered to introduce our new addition to the man she didn’t know – even though everyone knew the status. So I was yelling across to connect them. Of course, being me, I called them all on it, but they seemed genuinely surprised and hadn’t thought of making the introduction themselves.

So, because I help people meet others – and will do this introduction thing with strangers too – I tend to have people wanting to go out and network with me. It’s not a bad thing at all, and if you practice common courtesy and manners on the networking scene, you might see that by paying it forward, you’ll actually get a great return.