Apologies for not blogging more but we’ve been flat out this week listening to feedback from people and making changes. Thanks especially to Yannick, Manu, Simon, Derek, and Aneel for their ideas and encouragement.
Saying that, it’s not been all work and we did manage to get out of the office this Tuesday to attend a Business Scene event on Social Media, a worthy substitute for a night in watching the opening matches of the Champions League and well worth the trek across London on a rainy wet evening. The people attending were a varied business crowd, all very pleasant though different to the people at our last event which was the DConstruct web developers conference in Brighton. There’s a blog post coming soon on that event but it was pretty blue sky stuff so please bear with us while we try to understand it.
The talk at Business Scene was given by Nick Tadd, a self confessed web enthusiast who very successfully spelt out the opportunities for businesses that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and dare I say Cofacio offer. In the same way that individuals can manage and enhance their personal relationships via social media, so too can companies and organisations enhance their customer relationships. It’s about having a two way discussion, slightly different to more traditional marketing which has been more of a monologue. With social media the rule is that people buy people and conversations lead to clients.
After the event came the traditional hour of meeting and greeting. Now I for one was thinking of getting home to see the end of the football and putting my feet up so the idea of networking was not something I was really enamoured with, which is when the event organisers added a twist to the proceedings. It was suggested that each person write down three things about themselves, two of which were true and one of which was a lie, and that we then tried to meet as many people as possible and identify as many lies or truths as we could.
What resulted was the noisiest and most fun networking session I’ve experienced and probably one of the most productive. People noticeably relaxed as they revealed more about themselves and tried to guess the truth about the other person. It was a great example of how people enjoy discussing and talking about their interests, and a great example of how socialising for fun can be just as beneficial for discovering new opportunities, ideas and people.
Recently we’re often asked what Cofacio is going to give people and what’s in it for the user, to which we answer that conversation with others looking for the same can lead to knowledge sharing, new ideas and new opportunities. However, we shouldn’t forget that socialising with like minded people is fun, it’s something that we inherently enjoy and ultimately need if we like to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. For us then, Cofacio is as much about people having fun as about them finding what they’re looking for, we hope you agree.
