The art of “Magic” is enjoying a vogue, driven by a number of highly successful performers such as David Copperfield, Lance Burton, “Penn and Teller”, “Derren Brown”, Barry and Stuart, Criss Angel, Dave “Bulldoza” Mendoza and many other stage and TV performers.

Wait a minute why is Dave’s name included in that lot? Have you ever seen him at work? If you had seen what I have you’d agree.  I have never seen anything like it. I heard it on the Animal show as they discussed Dave Mendoza’s “power” or “influence” in the blogosphere. But until I saw it with my own eyes I couldn’t believe it.

Now don’t ask me why, I haven’t gotten there. I’m still stuck on how. Let me tell you what I mean. Dave called me and said he’d like to interview me for his blog. My first thought was panic. After getting the hyper-ventilating under control, my mind started racing… What do I say? but, but, nobody would be interested…. I’ve gained weight and can’t fit into my suits!! I have to buy a suit!! what if…. then I realized that there were circles of sweat under my arms and couldn’t keep my forehead dry.

Well; he put me at ease and said he had this questionnaire and he just wanted for me to take my time and answer it the best I could. So off to writing I went.  I hate writing about myself as many of you do, but after many agonizing hours, I finally sent it to Dave.

This is where the fun begins. He placed the interview on his site. Now let me tell you something; I had heard that when he did this, people received an overwhelming amount of LinkedIN invitations. So I braced myself but within the next two days I received right at 100 linkedIN invitations due to the article. I thought it is nice but that is not what I had been led to believe.

I noticed something amazing though, in the two days after the article I received the traffic that I would normally get in an entire month. That was mind boggling to me. That he referred so many people to my site.  WOW, an entire months worth of traffic in two days, I thought the servers where the site is hosted on wouldn’t hold.

Another thing that happened is that before the week was out Dave sent out an email to the members of the Six Degrees group in LinkedIn, highlighting 10 people including yours truly as open networkers. Now, I didn’t know about the email, and when I saw literally hundreds of emails coming into my mailbox, I was alarmed; I scrambled to see what was causing such an overwhelming amount of emails. Within a couple of minutes I had over 150 emails. I have a practice of answering each one of the linkedin invitations so I set myself to the task of answering emails. By 11:30 that night I finally gave up and went to bed. I had received over 500 invitations in one day (not even a 24 hour period). 

With a campaign of an article followed up with an email over the course of a total of 8 days resulted in 632 linkedIn invitations.  I received numerous compliments about my blog, made many new friends, received several resumes, was re-acquainted with some old friends, received business leads, and many networking opportunities, and to top it off my 3rd degree reach increased by about a million an a half, now it is at over 7.62 million.

As I laid in bed soaking all this in; it hit me like a bolt of lightning!!! What if we as recruiters could harness the power of the internet like Dave does. What if we learned how to bring out the best in people to connect and learn of others and share in our successes and share our network to help each other!!!! 

I am glad Dave uses his influence to give, share and help others. Could you imagine if he chose to wield that kind of influence against someone? But yet he’s always smiling and taking it in stride. When I asked him about it, he simply said, “we all put on our pants the same way right? Everyone has qualities worth highlighting and celebrating.” !!!!