This post is rated Sprinters, Olympians and Ironman.

I want to share the most rewarding experience of my young social media “career.” I am quite certain that you have heard the name Jon Acuff. Jon is a New York Times Bestselling Author and speaker who resides not far from me in Franklin, TN. I had the tremendous fortune of meeting Jon for the first time back in October. You see, he has already accomplished everything I aspire to do in the immediate future. I made it my goal to befriend Jon from the day I first met him.

The thing about influential people is that they are busy. Now, we all say that we are “busy” but this guy is sincerely busy! I knew I would to have to do something out of the ordinary to catch his attention. Jon has over 200,000 Twitter followers and 75,000 Facebook fans so to say that his influence is widespread would be a huge understatement!

I started with an ask, one simple question: “Jon, within the next 6 months what is your most important project?” Did I get a response immediately, NO. Did I give up trying, HECK NO! Patience is a virtue and knowing when to use it is crucial. Continuing to ask for what you want is convenient only for you and works the opposite way more often than not.

I began to listen to what Jon was tweeting about and took notice of his Facebook posts. One day he wrote a fantastic blog post about how to influence influencers. I read every word and saved the post to review every so often. Jon wrote about becoming friends with people of influence.

As we all learned from Dale Carnegie, the single greatest way to influence anyone is to ask them to tell you their story! So I went to school learning all I could about Jon. Some things I picked up along the way were his passion for running, his love of chips and queso and that his lifelong dream is to have a place in downtown Franklin that he can use to host events.

Another critical element of the “art of the ask” is to avoid being offended by a lack of response. Timing is everything and discouragement will kill desire almost always.

It has taken me 6 months, but I can now say with confidence that Jon Acuff is a FRIEND! And that is the most rewarding experience of my social media “career.”

Yesterday Jon tweeted this:

(the result: over 100 new Twitter followers in 1 day!)