Web Marketing That Works: Confessions from the Marketing Trenches

Chapter 14

The secret to online is offline: events and speaking

You can use tradeshows to network with people who would otherwise never return your email or phone call.

Timothy Ferriss, on his The 4-Hour Workweek book launch

At the Social Media Down Under conference in Sydney in 2013 we invited 13 speakers to share their stories. No one likes a hard sell at a conference, so we focused on delivering value, and guest speakers did the same. At the end of the day we handed out feedback forms to see how we might improve future conferences. One attendee wrote, ‘We'd love to work with Bluewire on our social media'. The next morning they had a proposal in their inbox, and they signed off within two hours. That was a five-figure piece of work, straight ...