The 4D Summit and Networking
When I speak to people about the 4D Summit, many say they love going to meet the same people they’ve seen at past Summits. I’m as guilty as anyone. While I understand that we all love seeing people we know and are comfortable with, I can’t help but feel that when we do so, we’re missing the real business opportunity that the 4D Summit offers.
Whether you’re a consultant looking for your next gig, an in-house developer, or a vertical market developer, there are potentially major business opportunities sitting at the lunch table over from you — but you will never find them unless you step out of your comfort zone and meet up with new people.
As Summit organizers, we haven’t been doing enough to foster networking as well as we could in past years. The team was challenged this year to promote business opportunity networking, and so far they’ve come up with some ideas, but I am sure there are many more.
One of the first ideas was to organize “birds of a feather” lunches, where we organize lunch tables around business topics such as medical, education, etc. We hope this will foster communication over some of Memphis’ world famous food.
Another one of the major ideas is to ensure that attendees come prepared and know exactly who they will meet at the Summit before they even get there. Rachel and the rest of the marketing team set up a networking site to help people get acquainted before they meet face to face.
While we have some other ideas germinating, I’m sure we could be doing even more.
So this is what I’m asking: What else can we do to foster business networking at the Summit?
Perhaps you’ve been at another conference that had some great ideas on how to do this. Perhaps you have some original ideas of your own. Either way, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Let us know - we’re not too proud to borrow.
Don’t forget though, if you’re coming to the Summit (or even just thinking about coming) please visit our new site, register and get networking!
September 12th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I would suggest that name badges are helpful, a list of attendees with email/phone numbers are helpful because you can check them off when are in a conference and return to your job, forgetting who you talked to.
September 24th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Ben, name badges are a given.
List of attendees with email/phone numbers run into spam/privacy issues that would require permission in advance.
With the summit networkng site, you can contact anyone without having their direct contact info and we will leave that site live even after the summit is finished to allow post summit networking etc