Raise your hand if you’ve received an overly friendly email from a stranger, asking you for a favor.

Everyone? I thought so.

Why do these bug us so much? Aside from the fact that we’re busy enough trying to do our own work, balanced with some personal time, and fitting in helping out people we actually know, the reason is that when a stranger asks us for a favor they’re doing so without having any relationship equity.

Relationship Equity

Relationship and social equity are things we’ve talked about here before – we’ve defined “social equity” as “how you build your credibility online to increase your perceived value by others.” So, by extension, I would say that relationship equity is how you build your credibility in general to increase your perceived value. Further, the more relationship equity you have, the stronger the bond is.

There are those with whom I have strong relationship equity – these are my friends and family. If they were to write something that they thought would be relevant to my audience here at Zen, I would be likely to read it and, if it was relevant to my audience, share it.

Read more: http://www.zenlegalnetworking.com/2017/09/build-relationship-equity-first/