Lemon-free networking for social media types: my first Brrism

Last night I went to my first ever networking event as a business owner.

I’m used to networking online, that glorious nether space where no-one can see me and I can think before I respond. I’ve attended real world networking events as an employee of other companies, and found them about as enjoyable as trips to the dentist: never as bad as you think they’ll be, but leaving one feeling drained and slightly pained afterwards. After years of hiding away, I finally had to go out into the world and say “This is me and what I do” and the thought was terrifying.

Luckily, I couldn’t have picked a better event for my maiden networking voyage; a Bristol based networking group specialising in social media called Brrism. I learnt two important lessons there, one personal and one professional, but first I want to share one of the best networking activities I have ever come across: The Hoedown.

We were asked for strap lines before the event, to go on name badges. The hoedown involved this:

1. Get into a pair
2. Read each others strap lines
3. Person A describes their business in less than thirty seconds
4. Person B listens, and then says back what they understand person A’s business to be about
5. Person A writes it down
6. Swap
7. Repeat in a new pair

At the end of the session, lots of people are met, and people have had the chance to learn about what each other does, but that's only the second-best result. What you also end up with is a list of people’s interpretations of what you do, based on your strapline and what you told them in your 30 seconds.

This is very powerful.

You end up with a list of common themes. If your pitch is right, the responses from the listener accurately reflect what you do, but if they’re off base and very varied, then there is likely to be something wrong with how you’re portraying yourself and your business.

If you’re organising a networking event, this is a great icebreaker. If you’re attending one soon, and you suspect that it has a high risk of being one of those “I’ll stand in the corner with a glass of wine looking like a lemon” events, then maybe you could suggest this to the organiser.

I mentioned some lessons learned earlier, and the most important relates to the hoedown exercise. When the name badge information was requested by email, I was up to my eyeballs in stuff to do. I was writing a post for the Prom Organiser, tweeting about Your Nisaba’s launch, drafting a guest post about podcasting and trying really hard not to spend time I didn’t have that day writing for Post-Apocalyptic Publishing. So when I read “Very Important! This can be fun or serious.” above the box for the strap line, I decided to have fun. This is what I typed:

Writer. Superhero-in-training. Delusional (in a nice way)

I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, probably all those other tasks. So when the hoedown structure was described, my immediate thought was “Oh no! I wish I’d written a better strap line!” And for a writer, that’s a pretty crushing thought to have…

In turns out that it was a really good strap line for me as an individual, but not for Your Nisaba. The writer part is a no-brainer. The superhero-in-training part enabled me to explain two identities. By day I write as Your Nisaba for businesses who are struggling to be noticed, using online pr and search engine optimised content to build visibility and credibility online, whilst by night I write post-apocalyptic fiction and run a short story club. That was great, I could bring in both sides of my personal writing coin, but if my goal was to just connect purely for Your Nisaba in that exercise, I failed. Luckily no-one asked about the delusional bit…

The responses back were good though, the most common being that I write for businesses to get them attention, which is a very clean and simple way to describe online pr and SEO copywriting.

So what am I taking away from this? Well, this was the incredibly important professional lesson: always think hard about how you present yourself and your business, even if it seems flippant or a two second task in the midst of workload madness. When it comes to talking about what you do, always take it seriously, even when you’re being fun about it.

And the personal lesson from the evening? Well, that’s easy:

People are not as scary in real life as I sometimes think. In fact they can be rather lovely.

So that was my first Brrism. A real world social networking event about social media, arranged via social media, enjoyed in person. I love the 21st century.

Tags: Brrism, business networking, Social Media

Posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 3:35 pm. Filed under Social Media.