Every book I read on networking talked about how important it was to build rapport: to mirror people or feign an interest in their interests. In short, use whatever techniques you can to be liked by people, then you can do business with them. Yet something wasn’t stacking up.

Every time I meet with a new company to talk about ramping up their content marketing efforts, the biggest challenge identified is being able to create enough content. So I ask about employees contributing content and if there is a process in place to welcome (and even reward) that. In 99 percent of cases, the answer is no (beyond the senior executives), we do not do that. And I say, why not?