Last week I spent creating and mailing out informational letters to other members of the Greater Greenwood Chamber of Commerce (GGCC), and this week has proven to be just as busy. Tuesday I headed to my first Trendsetters Luncheon, hosted by the GGCC. The topic was Using Social Media Effectively. James Burnes of Media Sauce gave quite a great lecture on the topic. I learned quite a bit, but I’ll save all that for my next post which will include all my notes from the session.
After the luncheon and all day yesterday I took some time off to get some painting done around the house. Even when I’m taking “time off” my mind still wanders to business matters. I got some good brainstorming done of the things that I will be getting ready for the 2009 Business to Business Expo in September. I also thought of a few other topics that clients especially might need to be informed about. I’m still hashing out the ideas, but (not-so-)lucky for me, I still have plenty of painting to do and thus plenty of time to hash.
Today I went to my first official “networking” experience, held by BNI. It was far different than I thought it would be, but for the better. I imagined it as being in a room with a bunch of professionals, exchanging business cards, and trying to “sell” ourselves. I hate “selling”. But it needs to be done. So I went, prepared for the worst.
It turned out to be quite different. Though there was a room full of professionals exchanging business cards, there was also a structure to the meeting. A few members of the group gave some rather beneficial quick talks, one of which was on pricing. (I’ll relay that information in another post as well.) All members then gave a 1-minute speech about their company, and the visitors then got to introduce themselves. After that there was a speaker; today’s was a real estate agent from Remax. Instead of a “speech” she had some multiple choice questions and a puzzle game board. Whomever answered the question correctly got to remove some puzzle pieces that slowly unveiled a riddle, and she then talked a little bit more about the question asked.
One really cool thing to me was that one of the businesses that I sent a letter to last week was represented there by one of their members. I hate cold calling, and it was a great thing for me to be able to put at least one face with a business I reached out to.
Next week I will hopefully be done painting so that I can start putting my plans for the B2B Expo into action. If I’m not done painting I probably will at least start on them anyway, but I just cannot stand to leave a project half finished. It drives me nuts. I will be creating a flash interaction piece for the Expo which I might use as a feature on the site somewhere. It will be a digital portfolio, though, so I will either just use it as an example in my portfolio or replace the entire portfolio area with it. Time will tell.
Soon to come will be posts on James Burnes’ Using Social Media Effectively talk, Pricing Tips, and the topic of “What Is Design?”.