Who Will You Be Hanging Out With After the Event?
You’re planning an event. You’ve got a client, a production team, vendors, sponsors and attendees. You’ve got your social media community and even random strangers who are reached by your marketing and PR efforts. You‘ve been networking your ass off. So who are you going to hang out with after it’s all over? Have you thought about that?
Well you should. Every event you produce is another opportunity to build your go-to team and develop your community, both physically and virtually. At every phase of your event’s development – before, during and after production – you can be creating some great and lasting relationships. Ultimately, isn’t this what it’s all about?
Building Your Business Team
Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, part of a large company, or anything in between, you’ll be working with many individuals who’ll be helping you to make this thing happen – technical crew, designers, caterers, photographers & videographers, furniture rental houses, carpet installers – the list goes on.
These are the people who do the work to turn your idea into a reality. You rely on each and every one of them to show up on time, perform their task and help get the show up and running on schedule. These folks should be good-natured, quick-on-their-feet, and excellent problem solvers. This is your team. Depending on if you play well together or not, you may or may not want to work with them again.
Tips:
- Be thorough, honest and detailed in your communication.
- If circumstances change, make sure to share the necessary information with all of the appropriate people in your team.
- During your working experience, leave room for positive and negative feedback to flow in all directions, between all collaborators. Learn to deliver constructive criticism, even when it’s critical.
- Mistakes will be made by everyone – expect them, and be ready to learn from them.
- Observe who knows best how to roll with the punches. Make them part of your dream team.
Creating an Active and Engaged Community
The people who attend your event or somehow connect to it via social media before, during and/or afterwards are all part of your community. They may be critics or fans, but they are also your future customers, clients and organization members. Don’t talk down to them – no one wishes to have their intelligence insulted.
You might be surprised how many enthusiastic supporters are out there just waiting to hear from you. If they can’t make it to your event in person, tell them about it via your blog. Post pictures and video on your FB and Twitter pages, or via Pinterest or Instagram. Seek out their feedback. Enjoy their praise and learn from their criticism.
Don’t Waste the Opportunity for Face-to-Face Contact
This is one of the most significant aspects of interacting with your guests at a live event. You actually get to shake hands, share some food and drink, and hopefully a laugh or two. All the Skype conferences in the world can’t take the place of getting to meet your online friends in person. And bringing new people into your circle is an equally exciting opportunity for growth and development of your project. Your success is all about the relationships you cultivate.
Remember – the way most people choose someone they want with them on their team is by determining if they can stand spending a significant amount of time with that person. In other words, who do they want to hang out with while they are working? If someone rubbed you the wrong way, I mean, you simply couldn’t stand being around them, would you hire them to work in your company with you? Would you want them for a client? Of course not!
Meeting someone in a social setting, like an event you’ve produced, is a great way to make at least a partial evaluation about whether or not they’d be a good addition to your team, or someone you’d like to collaborate with going forward. Think about that the next time you plan an event, and keep your eyes out for your peeps!
Photo from: http://www.everystockphoto.
- Published in Business
Online Writing For Realz by @projectmaven
If you do any sort of writing for the web, you have less than 30 seconds to keep my eyeballs on this page. If I’m reading your text, why should I care? How are you grabbing my attention and keeping it?
What makes your *thing* different from the next?
Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me a story that only you can. Got an anecdote to share? If it’s funny, illuminating, or contains some juicy gossip, I probably want to hear it. Does it make me see you for the quirky, unique person you are? Does it make your company stand out from all the rest? Does it make me care about your project or organization? Good, then maybe I’ll keep reading.
Do you have some area of expertise to share? Great. I’ll read your article if I’m going to learn something new. Please don’t just recycle the current jargon and package it with a pretty bow and expect me to be impressed. I want some valuable information that is accurate and reliable. And I want to hear it in an original voice. I want to know that I’m dealing with a real person with whom I want to connect, and maybe even conduct business.
We writers of online content have a tricky path to walk. We need our text to be grabbed up by the search engines via our keywords. Oh yes, they are still the backbone of our online search engine ranking. But we also have to distinguish ourselves from the avalanche of writing that is out there on any given topic.
Why do I care about what you have to say?
Remember that keywords are simply not enough. You have to be writing something that people care about, enough to comment on and share with their friends. You know that saying, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen?” Well the new phrase is, “Share it, or it doesn’t matter.”
Seriously, nothing happens in a vacuum anymore. It’s all about creating a buzz, getting people talking, increasing your following, your likes, and your friends. Get real, be honest, be original, take risks! Sure, use your keywords, but then go out on a limb and do something crazy. Distinguish yourself from the crowd with a story that only you can tell, insights that only you can share – something from your own, unique experience.
I’ll share a pet peeve with you. I do a lot of online writing – for my own creative projects as well as for clients. Lately I’ve had to do research on new topics I’m writing about, and I’ve become very discouraged at the quality of material that I’ve found. It seems like the internet is becoming an echo chamber of self-referencing material, with no clear authority or source to much of the stuff that sits at the top of search engine pages.
Without opening up a whole dialogue about Wikipedia, scholarship and online research (definitely a topic for another day), I will say that the internet as a collective representation of current thought and knowledge can use some smart and original contributions. If you take the art of writing seriously, and I hope you do, please make your work part of the solution, and not part of the problem.
If you like what you’ve read here, then have a look at the content branding workshop series I’ve developed with award-winning designer Jennifer Dopazo. It’s called The Branding Lounge. If you live in New York City, we have a new session coming up in a couple of weeks.
Photo courtesy of familymwr.
- Published in Business