I was talking to a buddy of mine and she proclaimed proudly that she had trimmed her holiday card list down to less than 20. I gawked at her in horror, not understanding why that could ever be a good thing.
I know, I know… it would be less expensive to have a smaller list. Less cards to buy, less postage, and…
Less connections.
You see… one of the most valuable things you have is your contact list, a list of everyone you know and stay connected to. The longer the list, the more valuable it is.
The people on your list may be friends, family, former co-workers, mentors, lawyers, vendors, recruiters. People you have built a personal or business relationship with. That is the difficult part.
So do the easy part, stay in touch. Even if it is only once a year by sending a holiday card. It is worth the investment.
An example:
When I heard I was getting laid off (the company was reducing staff by 20% and I knew project people would be the first to go), I sent out an email to my entire contact list. Within a week, I had dozens of leads, even a couple job offers (from people who knew my contact so well that they felt confident about hiring me sight unseen). The boost to my battered ego alone was worth my holiday mailing cost.
Grow that holiday mail list, don’t shrink it. My goal is to have it longer every single year.
Comments (1)
I agree with your point about maintaining a large contact list for holiday greetings. Last year I took a different route with my holiday "card" by creating a year-in-review photo collage composed of one or two photos/descriptions from each month of the previous year. I used a site called Tabblo to create my page, but I'm sure you could use others to do the same - even a slideshow on Flickr or some other photo sharing site would work. Going this route not only saved me money (I didn't have to purchase cards/stamps), it also saved me the time of collecting addresses. This alterna-card has been viewed nearly 1,000 times!
Posted by Kate F. | December 3, 2007 3:30 PM
Posted on December 3, 2007 15:30