I haven't met you, and this is crazy, but here's my article, share it maybe?

It started slowly.One day I got an email from someone I didn’t know, mentioning I’d once shared a post from his site, and wouldn’t I consider maybe looking at this other one and sharing that, too?Another time, it was someone saying she’d seen me share a post from someone else’s site, and she’d followed me on Twitter a long time and wouldn’t I consider maybe looking at this post of hers, or anything else on her site, and share that, too?More recently, I got, from a young brand (when does a company stop being a startup? Subject for another day), an odd email. I had Tweeted a post last year (yes, nearly a full year ago) — a friend had written about design strategies and calls to action. This company emailing me wondered if I might share a blog postthey had written on a similar topic.I will not name the company because they are far from the only one doing this (I have heard from many others getting similar queries in their inboxes). I would love to know, however, how much time they spent looking up who had tweeted this post a year ago. A. Year. Ago.Haven’t we heard all the stories about how social media and content marketing is all about relationships? You have conversations with people, engage (ooh, thatnasty buzzword!) — you build your network.Back in the pre-Facebook and Twitter days, we built relationships by commenting on other people’s blogs. If someone we’d never talked to before dropped a link into the comments, that was considered poor behavior. Even if the link was related and on-topic. The point is, you didn’t have the right to push your way into that conversation if you’d never even commented before.I’ve said it before — that’s like seeing two people talking about something at a cocktail party and barging in and pushing your product in their face and saying, “BUY MY THING. I HEARD YOU TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE MY THING, NOW BUY MINE.”You’d probably be kicked out pretty fast and never invited back to that party again.So here’s a protip: If you want someone to share your work, why don’t you start by … talking to her or him?A version of this post originally ran on Inc.com. And the headline ran on the version on LinkedIn.Photo courtesy of Death to the Stock Photo.