You know social media is mainstream when the big accounting firms get on the bandwagon.
This evening I attended a meetup for Michael E. Raynor, author of the new book, The Strategy Paradox. I learned of it from HeyLetsGo, a regional social network. I wanted to meet Raynor since he co-authored one of my favorite business books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and his new topic sounded like it might make interesting fodder for a blog I write on innovation.
It turned out, though, that the social-media aspect of the meetup was as interesting as the author. The event was an experiment for Deloitte. Held in a small upscale restaurant in downtown
Deloitte reps delivered a short presentation highlighting the experimental nature of the event. There were no attempts to sell the company’s services. Everyone got a free copy of the book. I’d say there were about 30-40 people there.
I found the audience to be of surprisingly high quality, given the lack of restrictions on attendance. In addition to spending some quality time with the author, I spoke with several other attendees whom I had never met before. All were business professionals with a strong interest in social media and in the strategy-focused topic of the book. It happened that nearly everyone I spoke to was self-employed. Several appeared interested in the networking aspects of the event. All were bright and inquisitive and the type of people who will probably blog about the book.
I don’t know if this meetup will ultimately prove successful in promoting the book, but I was impressed with both the attendees and the discussion. I’ll certainly be looking at applying this idea to marketing my own book, which is due next month. For an event with so few restrictions, I thought it was a notable success and a testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
Paul,
Interesting commentary. I attended this event to meet up with potential clients Jason Lin and partner Vinod Kumar of Alef Solutions. They suggested that we meet at the book event to combine our business discussion with networking. They sent me the WiKi notification, which I was fascinated by.
As I headed for the event, neither the book, The Strategy Paradox, nor the author, Michael Raynor, were of any interest to me. Like a good networker, I showed up early, which put me face to face with Michael Raynor for 10 minutes. I had no idea who Michael was or that he had written other books, much less a best seller. He had no idea who I was or that I wrote patents for a living. So I asking to tell me what the book was about in 10 words or less and then we talked about being self employed, dealing with clients and pricing our work.
Overall, this event was awesome. Two days later I am still following up, writing about it, making contacts and getting my own marketing punch out of it. That never happens with other events that I attend. This social media thing is not only effective, it’s fun. Thanks for providing the forum and good luck with your own book.
Ed
The quality of attendee impressed me. Considering that anyone could have walked in just to partake of the food and booze, I thought the people who showed up were right on the mark. It was nice to meet you!
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