How I totally blew it on LinkedIn!
Dr. Dumont Owen
Master Personal / Digital Brand Strategist, "Done For You" LinkedIn Lead Generation for Small Business Owners, Coaches & Consultants, International Best-Selling Anthology Author
This is soooo embarrassing!
The other day I sent an invitation to connect on LinkedIn and made a dufus mistake.
I was following the same advice I give my clients, but I screwed it up.?
I tell my clients to develop a few really good invitations that offer value and start a dialogue.
So far, so good.
I also tell them to visit that person’s profile, learn something about them, and then tweak their invitation to reflect something personal that can open up a dialogue.
Still doing good, here.
But then I make a rookie mistake. When I cut and pasted the message, I forgot to go back to my original template and instead pasted in the message from the previous person – resulting in the right message, but the wrong name.
Oops!
She accepted my invitation instead of blowing me off and told me about my mistake.
I took a deep breath.
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"OK, how are you going to address this one, Dumont?"
I wrote back.
"Oh my gosh! I'm so sorry. As someone who often gets addressed by the wrong name, (People call me Owen) I apologize for the mistake. It's definitely NOT OK to confuse names."
Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor, and we were off and running.?
What started with a faux pas, became a fun exchange.
... and I’ll never forget her name!
Here’s how to create an invitation that gets results:
The moral of the story is this: If you make a mistake, own it, and don’t try to defend yourself.?
Now not everyone has a funny name. Mine just happens to be, Dumont. (I was named after my grandfather.) What would you say if you made this kind of mistake?
Let me know in the comments.
Web Designer for Coaches | ?? ?? ?
2 年Oh the joy of mistakes. A good reminder we are human and an opportunity to laugh. How about never copy-paste on first message?
Mindful Mentorship for Brave Women Leaders, Mindful Ceos, & Minorities at Critical life Change-Choice points; Stop living in pain till life ends with no Meaning, Purpose & Joy! Awaken to Inspired life of Wisdom & Freedom
2 年I've done it! More careful now to put the name first before template or cut and paste and also double check name before hitting send button. Thanks for your great tips at Ben Gioia ("joya")'s Deep Dive yesterday.
Financial education for self-directed investors to achieve maximum growth and stability with today's opportunities.
2 年Haha - yes Dumont Owen, Ph.D., I've done a similar thing with emails. It is very embarrassing. But I've made a similar mistake in person as well. My response when I realize, is the same as yours. As soon as I recognize it I will follow up with an apology. It's hard to show your personal attention for someone when you don't even get their name right. But we all have these little mistakes throughout the day. I heard a statistic once that every person makes something like 1000 mistakes a day. Considering how many decisions we make, and many with little to no thought, it doesn't surprise. Fortunately most mistakes we don't even recognize because they are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But some do make us more embarrassed than others, even if they are not ground shattering.
Speaker, Author, BS Pundit and Coach. “Raising the consciousness of companies one CEO at a time.” PQ Certified Coach and Southwestern Consulting. Partner and Chair, Highrise Networks, NY Regional Group.
2 年This happens to the best of us. We are all in this together and we are all human.
Accounting Clerk, Co-Founder of Funding Focus, Head of Ops at Add then Multiply
2 年One of those "OOPS" moments. You're only human Dumont and me, I would have laughed it off too - life's too short to take these things so serious.