The second challenge in The 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge is to reach out to contacts that have gone stale; contacts that you haven’t touched base with in about 3 months.

Many of us get loads of email, and it’s hard to stay in active contact with everyone. Ron points out very smartly that old email can be a treasure trove of buzz.

Some quick tips on re-connecting:

• Tell people you were busy. That’s OK, people understand.
• Your reason for re-connecting is simple: you value them as a contact and want to see how things are going.
• Ask questions. Work-related questions are always good.
• Inject your own success story.

For small businesses or solopreneurs, re-connecting with old contacts could be a real lifeline. Keeping track of contacts is easy enough, it’s just a question of devoting a bit of time each day (or week) to reaching out.

Ron’s challenge was to reach out to a few stale contacts. That’s exactly what I did. I found 6 contacts that were quite positive in the past and sent them emails. It wasn’t an overly time-consuming task. I had been keeping track of most of them, so it was easy to:

• Re-introduce myself and restart the conversation.
• Comment on their success stories (launching a new website, new client acquisitions, great blog post, etc.)
• Introduce them to some news of my own (like the continued soft-launch of Business Blogs Now)
• Wish them well and ask them to get in touch.

And I look forward to speaking with each of them actively in the future. Reaching out to old contacts will become a staple of my weekly efforts; it’s easy, fun and a no-brainer in terms of generating buzz.

Want to join the 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge? Follow along as I try and complete as many buzz marketing tasks as possible, and try some yourself!