Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

My friend, Keith Lampe, works for OPENOnline in Columbus Ohio.  He’s part of the team who is responsible building relationships with potential customers. (Disclosure: OPENOnline was a client of Social Business Strategies at one time.)

When I met Keith a little over a year ago, he hadn’t yet signed up for LinkedIn.  Since that time, he’s been using LinkedIn as a powerful tool to develop business for his company.  I had the chance to catch up with Keith yesterday and get an update on how he has evolved his daily routine to leverage this tool.

Serendipity in Social Networking
I once had a boss named Ken Galloway who taught me a lot about business and the art of selling.  One day, around the holiday season, I walked into Ken’s office to find him crunching away on his PC.

When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, “scrubbing my database clean from all the people I can’t remember anymore.”  Ken later told me that he went through this process at the end of every year so that he could chop out the people who he had met in business, but over time had become meaningless names in his Outlook database.  It was evident that in doing this, Ken may have been missing valuable opportunities for potentially significant relationships.

Fast forward a few years to the rise of social networks like LinkedIn, and the dawn of internet-based data portability.  Keith’s story highlights something I think is very important:  we business folk can benefit from reconnecting with our past relationships and reigniting conversations.  Social web tools create an environment where users update their own information (as it changes), giving us the power to stay connected over time even when people move on to their next opportunity.  With the economy in recovery and massive shakeups over the past two years, masses of humans have found themselves on the move.

In Kieth’s case, an old high school buddy went on to become the President of a call center  And that business happened to be the right type of target client for his company, OPENOnline.  A social web presence on LinkedIn gave Keith visibility to all the information needed to take the appropriate action to, first, rekindle that relationship online and then arrange a time to talk business offline.

That’s pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

Can you apply Keith’s approach to using LinkedIn?  Are there people in your past that you should catch up with?  Can you possibly search for them on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and restart the conversation?

What say you?