One of my goals in 2014 is to more regularly connect with former colleagues, clients and journalists. It is not always easy to find time to network, but to keep a pulse on the business community as well as to maintain personal connections with the people who have made a difference in my life, it is important to take time to connect face-to-face.

As I was considering my goal, I began thinking about best practices for maintaining connections and relationship building. Here are my thoughts.

• Make Connecting In-Person a Priority. Working in the deadline-driven world of PR is often ridiculously busy and, like most careers, time-consuming. Given this, it is not always easy to make time for lunch or coffee with a former colleague or client. However, if you are going to maintain relationships, you need to connect in-person on a semi-regular basis. This might be once a quarter, twice a year or annually. Determine what makes sense for you and the people that you value, and set up alerts or reminders so you do not forget to reach out to them. LinkedIn has a wonderful new tool allowing users to set reminders to take place in a day, a week or a month.
• Focus on Developing and Maintaining High-Quality Relationships. I am a firm believer in quality over quantity. To develop quality relationships, it is important to understand people’s business and personal goals and to think about how you can add value to the other person’s life. In advance of meeting, I recommend coming up with the questions you want to ask so that you are honing in on the things that the person will be excited and proud to share. You must ask the right questions. These are ones that make the person feel good as opposed to making them feel as if you are wasting his/her time. For instance, you might ask: “What are you focused on that is important for you?” Listen carefully to the response and follow it up with a question to find out why it is important. A wonderful resource for questions to ask to deepen relationships and for advice to hone one’s listening skills is a book titled, “Just Listen,” by Mark Goulston.
• Promptly Follow Up and Follow Through. Send a thank-you note and recap any action items that you promised to execute or identified coming out of the discussion. Ideally, you are going into the meeting with the goal of adding value and offering the other person an upfront benefit, so you should be coming out of it with some ideas of things you can do. This may be sharing an interesting article or book, or brokering an introduction to someone in your network. Do not expect anything in return, but instead be pleasantly surprised when the person returns the favor.

Finally, I recommend staying current on networking best practices. There are a number of wonderful articles on this topic on Harvard Business Review’s website. I especially found Dorie Clark’s post, “Three Mistakes to Avoid When Networking,” interesting and informative, especially when trying to make new connections with people who don’t know you or are perceived as above you in status.

Networking takes work, but the results can be extremely rewarding with new or reaffirmed friendships and business relationships. The key is to make sure you make it part of your regular routine, invest in preparing and follow through. Taking these critical steps can make all the difference to building meaningful and long-lasting relationships.