In this era of virtual collaboration and e-mail, business travel is rarely the only way to get work done. Rather, we get on that plane or train or ferry because we think our work will be facilitated by actual in-person face time, because we recognize that there is work that can only be done effectively in the context of a relationship deepened with face-to-face conversation.

Building and supporting relationships is thus the real work of business travel. As you’re organizing your travel, it’s helpful to keep that purpose front-and-center in your planning and to constantly ask how your business travel is supporting the relationships you already have or want to create.

The previous sections of this book showed you how you can use LinkedIn to build your network from the comfort of your desk (or, let’s be honest, your sofa or bed). Yes, this can dramatically reduce the amount of time you need to spend on the road in order to build out your network. But once you do hit the road—which you need to do, if you want to convert some of those nascent connections to relationships of trust—then LinkedIn can help you stuff those business trips so that every minute delivers the maximum value.

In this section, I’ll show you three ways you can use social media and social web applications to do just that:

 

• First, I’ll show you how to use TripIt to make travel simpler, so that you stop wasting time on logistics.
• Second, I’ll show you how both LinkedIn and TripIt can make travel more rewarding by ensuring you spend time with the people who can make a difference to your work.
• Finally, I’ll show you how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to get the most from conferences.

 

Using TripIt to Make Travel Simpler

TripIt is a social network for travelers, especially business travelers. But actually the greatest benefit from this freemium service isn’t from its social connectivity, but rather from its simplification of trip planning itself.

Once you set up your TripIt account and add all your e-mail addresses, TripIt recognizes any itinerary or reservation you forward to plans@tripit.com as an e-mail about your travel plans and converts it to a line item in a specific trip. You don’t have to do any special formatting before you forward that e-mail: TripIt can make sense of almost any of the confirmation e-mails that are generated by travel, airline, or hotel bookings.

 

TIP: If you use Gmail, add your Gmail account to TripIt and set it to monitor for new travel plans. I have often headed to the airport without doing any prep, happy to find my itinerary waiting for me in TripIt, simply because I had Gmail monitoring in place.

 

The result is a tidy itinerary that lists all your travel details in one place on the TripIt site, accessible from the web or the TripIt apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. You can use TripIt to pull up your airplane reservation on your phone while en route to the airport and follow the embedded link to your airline’s check-in. TripIt will also give you a link to the SeatExpert map for the particular plane you’re flying on, so you can choose your preferred seat. You can forward restaurant reservations or event tickets to TripIt, and it will give you a map showing how to get to your destination. You can get a map of your entire trip on TripIt and use the mobile app to quickly get step-by-step directions.

 

TIP: Clean up your TripIt itinerary manually to make it as useful as possible. While TripIt is pretty good at parsing reservations and travel tickets, it has more trouble with things like event titles and addresses for event tickets. Go into your TripIt itinerary before you leave and make sure that event titles are readily visible and that address data is correct. You may want to add any meetings to your itinerary, so that they show up on your overview map of the trip as well. If you have staff support, you can add your assistant as a planner on any trip in TripIt, so you can delegate that cleanup work.

 

If you want to view your itinerary in your regular calendar or share it with family or colleagues, TripIt makes that easy. You can use TripIt’s outbound calendar feed to make all of your travel plans show up in your calendar. That way, you will see itinerary details side-by-side with any business meetings. If you’re consistent about entering meeting locations in the location field for each calendar event, you’ll have map links to help you get anywhere you need to go, whether it’s a TripIt event or a regular calendar item. TripIt also offers various options for sharing travel plans with family or friends, though the best way to share depends on how much detail you want to provide to a particular person, and whether or not that person is already a TripIt user.

 

TIP: You can also use Yelp to make the most of unscheduled time. When I find myself with a couple of free hours in a new city, I use Yelp on my iPhone to find the nearest wi-fi café where I can catch up on e-mail. If I need a little R&R, I do a Yelp search for bookstores, which is a good proxy for identifying an interesting neighborhood to walk around in, or failing that, browse vintage books. (Of course, by “books,” I mean “shoes,” by “vintage,” I mean “new,” and by “browse,” I mean “buy.”)

 

Using LinkedIn and Your Social Toolkit to Make Travel More Effective

While you can use LinkedIn to make new connections in your hometown, targeted LinkedIn searches really pay off when you travel. That’s when you’ll have a chance to meet or reconnect with people in your LinkedIn network, and a great excuse to introduce yourself to a whole new crew.

Here’s how to use LinkedIn and your social toolkit to make the most of your trip:

 

1. A month or two before your trip, look for any relevant Meetups or conferences that fall during or near your travel dates (so you can book around them.) Meetup and Eventful Connections are both great resources.
2. Consolidate your travel schedule in TripIt and your calendar so that you can clearly see any available blocks of time. Review the overall map of your schedule on TripIt and look at the location of meetings on a map, too, so you know what part of town you’ll be in at different points in your trip.
3. In LinkedIn, use advanced search to show you all 1st-degree connections in your destination city. Think about whether you want to meet with any of these folks. If so, reach out now with an invitation for coffee or a drink.
4. Think about your top business goals for this trip and this quarter: what kinds of people would make a difference to those goals? Use a targeted LinkedIn search to find people who meet your criteria, limiting your search results to people within ten, twenty-five, or fifty miles of your hotel’s zip code (your search radius depends on your flexibility and mobility). Then reach out to them as described in “from search to introduction” above. A trip to a city you don’t visit regularly is one situation where self-introductions often work perfectly well: “I’m going to be in your city, and I’d love to meet” is a great excuse to e-mail or tweet.
5. As you receive meeting acceptances, let geography determine which dates you set up when. There’s no point schlepping all the way downtown for a thirty-minute coffee on Tuesday if you’re going to be just around the corner from that same colleague on Wednesday. When in doubt, consult Google Maps, and be sure to factor in travel times.
6. Follow up on meetings with a LinkedIn connection request, and if the person you’ve met with is a fellow Twitter user, follow her on Twitter so you can stay in touch that way, too.

 

In addition to looking for LinkedIn connections in your destination city, you may also want to search your Facebook friend list to see if you have any Facebook pals in town, too. TripAdvisor can help you find even more people to meet with. By tracking so many people’s travel plans, it can not only tell you when you’re in a city where somebody you know lives, but can also tell you if someone in your network will be traveling to the same city you’re visiting at the same time.

However, you may want to be careful about making connections on these travel-specific networks. I put all my TripIt connection requests through a test that’s even more stringent than the LinkedIn favor test. The test boils down to this: if I had a free hour in San Francisco while this person was there, too, would I pass up a visit to the Bi-Rite Creamery (my favorite ice cream shop on the West Coast) in order to see him or her? If this person is more important than salted caramel on a sugar cone, I make the connection.

 

TIP: Think twice before tweeting your travels. (Same goes for sharing Facebook, LinkedIn, or TripIt updates.) If you’re flying into Paris for a two-day meeting that leaves you no time to visit your college roommate, do you really want her to know you were in town? Post a Facebook update about the great meal you just ate while gazing at the Eiffel Tower, and your secret is out. Sometimes the best way to get the most out of business travel is to fly under the radar, social media-wise, so you can save your time for business meetings.

 

Using Your LinkedIn Toolkit to Get the Most from Conferences

Using LinkedIn—along with a few other social and mobile tools—can help you make conferences as productive as possible and minimize the social anxiety that sometimes goes with large professional gatherings.

 

TIP: Don’t let dress-code anxieties contribute to the stress of a conference. Search for images on Flickr or do a Google image search to find snapshots of past years’ events so you can get a feel for what people are wearing.

 

While social networks like Twitter and FourSquare can be valuable parts of your conference toolkit, if you are using LinkedIn as the heart of your professional networking system, then you need a LinkedIn strategy for going to conferences. Here is a seven-step strategy for using LinkedIn to turn conference introductions into ongoing connections:

 

 

TIP: Use OpenTable to book eight-to-twelve-person tables at nice restaurants near the conference location for each evening of the conference. Think of a loose theme for each night (people working in the health sector, Latino attendees, folks experimenting with a new subfield) and invite people to join you for dinner (I usually say I’m “convening a gang” to avoid the implication that I’m hosting and paying for the whole table). To make things easier—or if you haven’t sent out your invitations by the time the conference starts—enlist two or three co-conspirators and have each invite two or three people.

 

 

TIP: If you’ve made a new pal and your pal is on Twitter, send your pal a tweet from your smartphone right then and there, before you lose one another’s business cards or Twitter handles. I like to take a snapshot of me and my new pal and tweet it to him or her along with the hashtag #nicetomeetyou. That way I can see all my new pals in one place. This is a great way to keep track of and in touch with new contacts without feeling as if you need to add them all to LinkedIn.

 

 

TIP: If you’re an Evernote user, add the snapshot of that business card pile to Evernote with the title “met at Conference X.” Now if you’re ever wondering where you met someone, an Evernote search will bring up a snapshot of his or her business card in context. (Depending on how many cards you collect, you may need to take several photos so the resolution is good enough to make the card text readable.)

 

 

TIP: If you want to establish a LinkedIn connection with someone senior or well known, consider writing a personal connection request reminding him or her that you enjoyed meeting at Conference X and would like to stay in touch. You can’t do that from within CardMunch, so you’ll need to log into LinkedIn to send that personal request.

 

 

By making your business travel easier and more effective and helping you get the most out of conferences, LinkedIn enhances the time you spend on the road. Business travel should be about relationship building, but so often the stress of dealing with logistics and the anxiety of meeting a whole whack of new people keep it from being an effective way to connect. Using social tools can focus your on-the-road time on the people you really want to get to know.