How Not to Run a Speed Networking Event

Speed networking for business professionals seems to be all the rage these days.  I attend quite a few speed networking events and have always found a few quality contacts from an event.  Plus, a lot of them are free to attend, and that translates to a cosportunity of zero!  But it always frustrates me in the way a lot of them are run and how sensitive the organizers are to feedback.  So I mostly just keep my mouth shut and go along with the flow, but I have to tell you, this last one that I went to alienated a lot of people because it came across as the old bait and switch.

Luring people to your event with the promise of one thing and delivering something else is a really quick way to get them not to come back!   And that’s exactly what happened at this event.  It was heavily promoted, mostly through e-mails, and kept hitting on the fact that space was limited and you had to hurry to sign up, etc.  Well, the organizer needed 88 attendees, and it became quickly apparent the morning of the event that they were no where near the magic, perfect, ideal, supreme number of 88.  There were about 50 attendees, a great number for speed networking, but the organizer didn’t seem prepared to handle any rotation schedule for any other number than 88.

Plan B for this event was to have each speed networker stand at the front of the room and give their 60 second commercial.  And as your commercial was airing there were some helpers who were passing out business cards and promotional items.  Needless to say, as everyone was busy passing promo items it was harder to pay attention to the commercials.  I was just annoyed because Plan B would have occurred if there were 87 or 89 participants, and let’s face it, it’s really difficult to get an exact number to show up and participate.    There are other methods besides the supreme number of 88 with 11 tables of 8 participants that would have worked, so what if there was one or two empty seats or a couple of people had to repeat a rotation.  I even posted a method months ago on slide share that doesn’t matter how many people you have.  Even though I’ve pointed speed networking organizers to it, well, let’s just say that since it wasn’t their idea it has gone nowhere.

The slide share presentation can be found here:

http://www.slideshare.net/MarkRodeffer/easy-speed-networking-method-2814054

What is cosportunity?

Cosportunity is a word that I made up to represent a contraction of cost per opportunity.  I used to be an engineer, and my brain still thinks like an engineer, logically.  So when I ventured into business for myself in the marketing and advertising world I was continually surprised to come across so many unfair comparisons between my product and other products.  Sure I could counter these comparisons with statements and facts about my product versus other products, but still, people weren’t buying it.  So I sat down over the holidays of 2009 with some egg nog and my logical brain, to come up with a way to fairly compare advertising products.

Naturally, I turned to mathematics.  Not a far turn for me, as math has always been my friend.  Well, except for that partial differential equations class in college.  I wanted to figure out a way to equalize advertising proposals taking into account the two R’s of advertising, reach and repetition.  My publication was constantly being compared to other publications on the basis of it’s reach, or circulation.  When I told someone that my circulation was 16,000, it was often met with a comment about well such and such publications’ circulation is 55,000, or 100,000, and it costs this much or that much.  People seemed to have blinders on when it came to circulation and operated under the bigger is better philosophy, and didn’t pay as much attention to the second R, repetition.

Ask any advertising peddler and I hope they tell you that repetition is more important than reach.  If they don’t, then you may want to find another peddler.   When the circulation comparison was brought up, I’d always inquire about the frequency of the publication and life of the ad within the publication.  Most often, the response just went back to circulation.  I wanted to come up with a way to get people’s attention to the second R, and after a few egg nogs, it occurred to me that multiplication was my answer.  From many engineering experiments and number crunching, multiplication was often a way to equalize parts of a problem, so why not now?   Multiplying the reach and the repetition for a publication would give a factor that could be used to make fair comparisons across publications.

I like the word opportunity better than impression, so I decided that R x R is equal to the number of opportunities.  Every time an advertisement is seen, it’s an opportunity for a customer to act on that ad, and I’m certainly okay being compared against another publication’s number of opportunities.  Factor in the cost along with the number of opportunities and now we’re really talking.  Not only can you compare the number of opportunities, but the cost of presenting each opportunity.  The cost per opportunity is nothing more than the cost of the advertising divided by the number of opportunities it creates.  Cosportunity is born!