So You Want To Pick Someone's Brains? Do It Right.

Just recently, I saw a post in my Facebook news feed from a well known business person who had had a complete stranger reach out to him on Twitter asking if he had an email address as he wanted to pick his brains about something. His response back was that his brains were not available for picking.

Think about this request coming to you for a second. Someone requesting to pick your brains is way too vague and immediately sounds very time consuming, it's not precise enough, so is the person asking in an effective way, or is the person refusing to have his brains picked just being awkward? It got me thinking.

I am sure lots of well known business people get asked questions like this all the time and if they stopped to reply to each and every person who reached out, they would never get any work done. Image Richard Branson’s inbox from all kinds of people across all parts of the world with probably one of these same three questions:

1. How can I meet you, you are my hero?
2. How can I get access to your business network?
3. How can I get you to invest in my company?

Now I am certainly no Richard Branson but I get my fair share of requests to pick my brains or review someone’s online pages and I like to do as many as possible, so in order to get through them, I set some criteria, some of which may be helpful for you in your endeavors when you reach out to someone:

1. Apply some etiquette – starting off a relationship with “what’s your email address…” is not going to get anyone very far. Would you say that to their face if you met them in the street without any preamble first? No you wouldn’t, so why do it online?
2. Be truthful – Only last week I received a request from someone that told me how much my book “Start with Hello” had changed their life. That’s great to hear, but the book doesn’t come out until October!
3. Make them smile – It’s hard to resist doing something for someone when they have made you smile, particularly if they have made you laugh out loud. I wrote a post about this here. This week, a chap made me smile in his email because he put at the bottom that “as he had friends in New Zealand, we were practically related”. I think we have all said “You live in Los Angeles? I know someone that lives there, you might know them?” It made me smile.
4. Who do you know in common – There is nothing wrong with leveraging from a joint connections’ name and making it into a warmer request if you know them well enough.
5. Add some personality – Write like you speak, not like something you have cut and pasted from your website.
6. Get to the point – Can you do everything above and ask your specific question in 100 words or under? These are very busy people you are reaching out to, so keep it short.
7. Say thanks – it’s appreciated.

Social sites such as Twitter have made reaching people reasonably easy. It’s not that hard to find someone’s email address, or even guess an email address, but better yet, if they are on LinkedIn, you have the Inmail option. Of course, you could try the really “old fashioned” but highly personal hand written letter in the mail; it’s still an intrigue to get one of these.

Picking someone’s brains is not a bad thing, it’s how we learn, Asking a question out loud or online to your network is brain picking of the very small amount of time kind, but ask in the right way and know how far you can go.

I don’t think he was being awkward with his response that his brain was not available to be picked given the way the initial request was received.

What do you think? Do you get requests like this? How do you handle them or are you the one with the request? What has worked for you?

I do hope you follow my posts in the future. My book “Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days” (Wiley) is available now and my next book “Start with Hello” (Wiley) will be out in October but available for pre-order on Amazon. If you want to pick my brains please email me linda@lindacoles.com.