- Today on The Journey,
we'll be talking about how to get the most
out of networking events.
If you're not taking advantage of these events,
you're doing yourself a disservice of opportunities
to showcase your brand and build the opportunity
to gain more for what you're putting into investing
in your business.
- I think something that's interesting
is when people think networking events,
or at least when I think networking events,
I think of oh, I only need to go when I'm looking for a job.
But it's actually the opposite, you should go obviously,
when you're looking for a job and you're unemployed,
which we have a great video right here about that.
But also, when you have a job,
and maybe you want to expand your network.
It's always a great plan to have more connections
because you never know when they'll be able to help you
or your business or vice versa.
- And it is important to know
that you're building relationships.
It's not about just passing out a card
and saying your piece and not thinking about the other one.
You wanna make sure that you're genuinely wanting
to connect with these people.
So first thing you wanna do is some prep work
before the event.
Last year, I did a keynote speech at a conference.
Well, there were other speakers there,
but what I did was I saw the list,
and I reached out to them on LinkedIn, Twitter,
and I made sure to make a connection
so that when the event happened,
we had already had that first impression.
- And they're more inclined to talk to you
because they know who you are, you've been interacting.
And you can jump right into really meaningful,
deep conversations rather than, hi,
my name is and that old stuff.
- Exactly, and then during the event,
there's opportunities to have the conversations
at the event, but then also online,
see if the event has a hashtag
that you can be using throughout the event
when opportunities arise,
great slides that you saw during talks
that you really wanted to showcase to your clientele
or your audience,
and you can be seen as one that creates great content.
Another tip is, use that name badge.
Some interesting things to do is say,
hey, I'm looking forward to network,
or maybe you have a unique name
that you want to phonetically spell
so people know exactly how to pronounce it.
- Also, you should use that as an opportunity
to share on social media that you are there.
So again, use that hashtag but take selfies,
so people will know, hey,
he's wearing a lime green suit today,
I need to see that guy.
And it will give people an opportunity to recognize you
when they're also looking at the social media posts,
so they can reach out to you as well.
- Time to break out my lime green suit.
- Get ready.
- So during the event, have some great content to share,
take pictures of some of the speakers on stage.
You've already done your homework ahead of time,
so you know what parts of those speeches
are gonna interest you and potentially your audience.
- And also those speakers,
they're focused on their message and their presentation,
they're probably not gonna have very many opportunities
to take photos of themselves.
So by you taking photos of them
and tagging them and sharing.
They're gonna appreciate that
and it creates an opportunity for you
to slide into those DMs,
and have that conversation.
- So after your event, you can keep the conversation going
because during the event,
the speakers, they're focused on what they're doing,
so they may not have time to interact.
A week later, you can mention the event
bring up the fact that you enjoyed
a certain part of their speech
and continue to connect with them after that.
- So a really great thing that you can do
with all of your awesome speaker notes
is you can turn that into rich content for your audience.
You can create a blog post,
here's the top five things I learned at this conference
or this networking event,
or if there's one particular speaker,
you can do top five quotes,
especially if it's a really high profile person,
people are gonna be searching for that person
and maybe quotes by that person.
And so not only is it a great way to get new followers
and new readers, but it's also an even better way
to show that you are a contributor to that community.
- Today, we talked about how to get the most
out of networking events.
I would love to hear from you in the comments below
and tell us about your favorite part of a networking event
that you just went to.
- And of course, be sure to like, subscribe to our channel
and hit that notification bell so you can be notified
when our next video drops.
Until next time, this is The Journey.