Jade Craven

I just registered for the Connect Now conference in April. I may be freaking out. It will my first interstate trip by myself and will be a massive challenge. Its also a massive opportunity.

I love conferences. We don’t get that many awesome ones in Australia and Connect Now has attracted a high calibre of international guests. If you live in Sydney, or are attending, let me know so we can catch up.

Word of mouth and social media are my main methods of driving traffic to my business and projects. I’ve started planning my conference networking strategy and thought I’d write a quick post sharing my tips. I’d love for you to share your tips in the comments.

Go in with a plan

Planning is key. Most conferences are hectic and it is so easy for your schedule to get out of whack. The amount of work you do is dependent on your goals. My goal is to connect with as many people as possible because I dislike planes and live interstate. I also want to interview some of the speakers and attendees. My plans revolve around:

• Meeting those that will be attending
• Catching up with the people that I
• Figuring out the interview questions where applicable
• Researching the speakers so that I can get the most out of the 3 days
• Arranging my finances and travel plans.

I’m starting early so as to make the week as seamless as possible. Its going to be a busy week and I want to make it as awesome as possible.

Research the speakers beforehand

This is something that I excel at. I usually do a lot of research prior to connecting with someone so that I can show that I know my stuff. There will be a mixture of people attending so I will be varying my research according to the person. I will be:

• Reading their books. If I’ll be getting their books on the day, I will buy the ebook version.
• Read their free ebooks
• Go through their blog.
• Research the interviews they’ve done via blogs, youtube and traditional press.
• Look for any keynotes and presentations they may have uploaded online.
• Observe how they interact with people on twitter
• Research their company/business.
• Contact them to see if there is anyway I can help promote their projects to my network.

This will be time consuming so I’ll do bits and pieces between now and the start date. I have only been to two conferences so will be adjusting my research as I learn.

Connect with the organizer in advance

This is something I did by accident last year. I did this because I wanted to help out and really loved the work Siobhan Bulfin was doing. It has only been recently that I realized that this connection – which I see as a friendship – could be useful.

I can learn about the behind the scenes stuff which will be useful when blogging the event. It may also be easier to get interviews and just know more about whats going on. I can see how this is useful in a business sense, but most importantly I’ve learned how it can be helpful to an anxiety sufferer in a different city.

I plan to adopt this strategy with future events but will carefully omit the bit about me having anxiety.

Plan to catch up with local people while in town

I have many social media friends who probably wont be attending this conference because they are well connected with the local social media community and can’t justify the entry cost. Thats cool. I decided to fly in a few days early and meet people on the Monday and Tuesday.

I am working on this in advance as it means coordinating multiple peoples schedules. I suspect I’ll be going to a meetup, a musical and will be meeting various people around the city. It will be tough – but I guess it means I’ll have to fly up for another Wicked performance business trip.

Have your elevator pitch and promotional materials planned well in advance

At my last two conferences, I met several people who would be considered an ideal client of our new business. Instead, I referred them to trusted friends. I’m kicking myself now because those clients were sneezers and ended up referring a lot of work to someone else. Those contacts became friends and thats brilliant.

It costs a lot of money to attend conferences. There are expenses associated with attending and travelling to get their. Currently I’m laid back about how much work I get because I go primarily to connect and learn. This event is primary to meet many of my Sydney friends in the days prior to the conference.

I wont be actively promoting my business but I’ll be watching how others promote theirs and will try to make as many new connections as possible.

Over to you

These are just the basics of what I’ll be doing for this trip. I have have some hard core techniques but didn’t know if there was any interest. Let me know about further questions and ideas in the comments and I’ll respond in a follow up post.

Those who follow my twitter or facebook account may know that my friend, Bill Journee, and I prelaunched our joint business site. It was the culmination of an amazing, and insane, fortnight. Its called Social Media Solutions and is looking awesome.

In my last post, I talked about how I got into the NEIS program. What I didn’t say was that literally minutes after getting accepted, I contacted Bill asking if he wanted to work together on this project.

15 days. We got the bare bones of a business up in 15 days. This was the closest I had come to a launch and it taught me more than any blog post or course could have.

This post may at times have a slightly negative tone. Thats because the lessons we learned came from mistakes. We had agreed that we were willing to learn on the fly rather than delay putting ourselves out there. It was hard and exhilarating but so worth it. I’ve been gushing about its success to Bill all day.

1. You WILL screw up

Its inevitable. Mistakes happen. Bill and I went through the process so many times to ensure it went seamlessly. Then we moved it onto our server, went public, and everything went smoothly. Until we woke up this morning.

One client encountered about 3 errors all up. They were tiny, and just oversights, but it was still a blow to my self esteem. We’d poured so much of ourselves into this project and felt completely spent this morning when smoothing out the kinks.

The mistakes taught me so much about work/life balance. I learned that its really important to distance yourself from your work. It also taught me about taking care myself so that I could handle whatever stress the day threw at me.

2. Communication is key

Bill and I are good friends. We’ve been helping each other with mutual freelance projects and had developed an understanding of how each other works.

However, 5 hours before launch the communication just broke down. We were exhausted, slightly cranky and on edge. We were trying to work out the bugs in e-junkie and I kept on accidentally undoing Bills work because we never fully clarified how we were going to try and fix the problem. Bring on the unnecessary stress.

I also may have prelaunched the site on facebook while forgetting that Bill had put an IP block on it so only we could see the changes. Fortunately, we were minutes from prelaunching and it didn’t cause a fuss but it reminded me that we were partners in this business. We weren’t just two people trying to do our own thing on the same site. I would like to publicly thank Bill for not yelling at me during this launch.

This was a vital lesson. We now need some processes in place to ensure we are communicating clearly. I know this is something we will be figuring out as we gear up for the full site launch.

3. Be prepared for criticism

This was a fascinating side effect of this launch. I had a couple of people send private DM’s pointing out spelling errors and picking up flaws in the shopping process. These were from friends who I trusted so I was very thankful for their help. Even so, it was tough knowing that you could slave over something and make silly mistakes.

This was a very useful lesson. If you work really hard supporting your network, they will support you. It made me feel really special as I put a lot of effort into my online connections.

4. Not everyone will be as excited as you are

This lesson was hilarious. We were so pumped about the launch that we didn’t realize how small it was in comparison to product launches. The small scale was intentional. We didn’t want to be swamped with work but wanted to promote the brand, and ourselves while working on the main site.

There was some buzz, but I had forgotten one of the key lessons of social media. Building trust takes time. I was able to reach out to a number of my close friends who showed interest and support in the business which was amazing. These people had heard about my struggles with freelancing and were genuinely excited to see me get it off the ground.

Now that we are out there, its the fun part. Now is the time where I get to dive into the community and see how we can help people. This will give us the chance to learn so much before the full launch and also build up more trust in the twitter community.

How I can help you.

Now that this prelaunch is out of the way, I can focus on finishing the e-course and tweaking the blog. I’m really excited about delving back into content creation.

• I’ll be doing a guest post campaign for the ecourse launch. I had to delay a number of offers due to my schedule but I will be setting aside a fortnight for this campaign. If you’d like a post, I’d recommend getting in early. Either reply in the comments or shoot me an email.
• If you are looking for help setting up wordpress, you can check out Social Media Solutions. We have two basic offers available including free wordpress installs. We will be adding consulting and twitter support when we fully launch. You can get access to special deals by signing up for the waiting list.
• I’ll be answering a lot of social media questions on the smsols account. I try to keep my personal account for chatting, rather than self promotion, so love that I can share awesome content about social media.

I have come to the conclusion that my life is weird and that I will always be crazy busy.

Last Monday, I got a call telling me that I’d gotten into a small business program. This would give me full training for 6 weeks while I set up a business and 12 months of income support. The catch? It started the next day.

That was over a week ago. This has meant I had to cut down on my guest posting and twitter usage. It also means all my spare energy goes into researching financials or trying to finish the e-course.

I have no mental energy left to think about blogging topics. Thats where you guys come in.

What would you like to hear about?

I get asked a lot of questions via email and twitter and try to cover these in my guest posts. I thought I’d try the same for my own blog.

I’d really appreciate it if you could share what you’d like to learn about. It could be any aspect of blogging, networking or building a business.

Once a week, I will turn one (or more) of those questions into a blog post. I’ll also try to interact with you guys as much as possible in the comment section.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep on forging ahead with NEIS and pumping out the content for the e-course. I’m really looking forward to when things slow down and I can go back to hanging with my social media friends.