Hull Chamber of Commerce Dinner

Round off the week with a quick account of last night's Hull and Humberside Chamber of Commerce dinner last night. The keynote speaker was Michael Crick who gave a witty and passionate account of the state of British Politics.

I took as my guest Russell McGrath who runs Tandem Marketing in Bradford. Russ had previously invited me to the Bradford Chamber Dinner in November, having been an invaluable source of business advice as well as top class provider of mailing and telemarketing services.

A pity in some respects that the dinner was held on a Thursday, I still had to get up this morning and write my blog send my tweets and meet two BforB members later today to discuss aspects of social networking.

By the end of the evening Russ had met two new colleagues and I managed to talk face to face with somebody with whom I had only had dealings by e-mail. Events such as these are, quite rightly, a celebration of the work of a body that has been around for nearly two centuries. But from a small business owner's perspective the money spent on a dinner was a marketing investment. Putting faces to names, exchanging views on a range of topics and enabling a friend and colleague to boost his connections was worth more than a tweet,  Yellow Pages ad or a mail shot.

Any form of networking is the best value marketing strategy.

Pleasure To Meet You: How Not To Follow Up

Following from a previous post Pleasure to Meet You. In it I wrote about the simple networking practice of sending an E-Mail to someone after you have may them at an event or networking meeting.

So what next? Well not a lot. What is really tempting is to get your new contact's e-mail address and stick it on a list of requests on your LinkedIn account to boost your connections. This is to be avoided. Social networking sites are a tremendous way of keeping touch with contacts, I use Facebook as an alternative to email to keep contact with my friends and family, but unlike others I don't have 399 "friends''.

Whilst not everyone shares this view, I think that LinkedIN and Facebook are tools for keeping in contact with genuine colleagues and friends, if the relationship has no basis in real world then you have no business making "friends " with someone on line.

It follows therefore that requesting a LinkedIn arrangement from someone you have met once and who is yet to write back to you might be seen as bad manners. Like I say, not everyone takes this view, but it is best to be safe and not be seen as too pushy, by waiting for a reply to an e-mail before beginning to tie the virtual knot.