Gene Juarez Salon & Spas named location for April Kreate Bellevue Networking event

March 22, 2011

For immediate release:

Gene Juarez Salon and Spas flagship location at the Bellevue Galleria in downtown Bellevue will be the host location for the April 2011 ‘Kreate’ CONNECT Afterhours Networking Event.

Each venue selected into the Kreate realm provides a networking-rich atmosphere where business professionals come to meet, mingle and connect with other professionals,” says Kreate Founder and Chief Kreative Strategist Julian Michael. “We are honored at Kreate to add Gene Juarez to our exclusive list of host sites for our feature event! There is something to be said about networking amongst others where it really feels comfortable to network,” Michael adds.

Kreate CONNECT events draw an average attendance of 55-75 and continue to grow in size and quality of attendees as their network expands. Each event features appetizers and nibbles provided by an exclusive caterer such as Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery. They also team up with a local winery such as Port Gardner Bay Winery in March.

When attending a Kreate CONNECT event it is important to bring lots of business cards, a super positive attitude that you will meet your next power partner or referral buddy, and to prepare yourself for a step-up in your networking experience.

Kreate is based in Redmond, Wash., and specializes in Creative Project Management, Social Media Strategy, Consulting and Training, and in Branding for Small Business.

For more info on Kreate visit their website at www.KreateMediaAgency.com

Twitter Turns Five Years Old Today

March 13, 2011

by Julian Michael

W-O-W! To think that LOL, BRB, LMAO, B2B and many more acronyms were rarely used until its inception into our daily lives just a short time ago.

Many of us aren’t even sure how we publicized events, chatted with super smart people completely out of our time zone, and/or found out great information at the blink of an eye until Twitter, Facebook and a few other biggies came along. In terms of social media and what that means to our local groups in Bellevue networking and Seattle networking, we’ve definitely ridden the Twitter training and learning wave with many professionals now in the ‘know’ into Tweetville!

Happy Tweeting everyone and a huge thanks to their founders!

Are You Networking Strategically and Following Up: Five Triggers to Keep Yourself on Point

by Julian Michael for WEventSource.com

Did you make some important contacts this month? Did you spend that extra time connecting with key potential strategic partners and future high referral sources?

Each month many of us tread out into the networking waters in search of meeting a potential client, meeting a great referral partner, or meeting a strategic partner that is good for business. However, did we make the time to connect with these people following the event? Were we looking to have a great conversation, only to forget to follow up until three weeks later when momentum was lost and the conversation was forgotten.

Here are Five Triggers to keep yourself on point when it comes to following up:

1) At networking events and functions, keep the cards of the people you want to follow up in a separate pocket and write notes on them if you can.

This will help you to start being organized from the get-go! Sometimes I’ll connect with up to 40-50 people at a large event, or even 20 is still quite a few. However, I don’t intend to follow up with each and every person, but generally the person that I enjoyed a conversation with and we can possibly help each others’ business. This way instead of coming home and having a monster stack of cards, I’ve given myself a clear line to remember who I need to follow up with soon.

2) Use your ‘drivetime’ or ‘downtime’ to make a few calls throughout the week.

Simple: Use off-peak time for following up. For many of us, we don’t necessarily live two minutes away from downtown or meeting locations. Thus, I always carry a small stack of ‘follow-up cards’ with me every time I take trips from Redmond into the city and back. This allows me to make two to five calls per 30-minute trip, maximizing my quality work time so I don’t need to make so many calls when I’m working on campaigns or designs while in the office.

3) Write yourself two different general follow-up emails and save them as drafts on your computer or in a Word doc.

Since most likely you’ll follow up by email to maybe setup a coffee or lunch meeting, I usually have a couple emails I’ve prepared as templates, then just add additional paragraphs and personal information into this email. This practice will help to save you time and at very least, provide you with an email already formatted to click send!

4) Ask each person you would like to follow up with if it’s OK to connect with them on LinkedIn and/or Facebook, then actually spend a few minutes doing this!

One of the best ways to follow up – and better yet – STAY connected with professionals you meet, is to connect with them online through your most highly used social networking site. “Is it OK if I connect with you on LinkedIn later,” is all you need to say. I’m not sure if I remember anyone ever saying ‘no’ unless they didn’t have an account (and I have stories about this if anyone ever asks). Make the extra effort at the close of your conversation, usually right when your card is being passed.

5) Download a business card scanning App onto your smartphone (such as ‘CamCard’).

One of the easiest ways to capture information without needing to enter the information manually into your content management system (CMS), email database such as Outlook or MacMail, or other, is to simply scan the card in. This takes about 10 seconds per card and it’s super easy. I think I paid $10 or so for this and has saved SO much of my time! Typically I’ll only scan the cards of those I need to follow up with so I have them saved in my phone if needed, and then uploading them onto my computer is much easier when I sync up my iPhone to my iMac every week.

All together these five items will help you save time and energy in your typical work week when it comes to cataloging and organizing your contacts, which in turn leads to a much more streamline process for your follow-up system. Be sure to try to pull at least three of these triggers and you’ll be on your way to following up more efficiently, with more people, and help build your business quicker!

Please leave a positive comment below if you enjoyed this article, thanks!

Kreate TV for Business Professionals Coming Soon!

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Do you classify yourself as ‘busy’?

Do you enjoy learning but find it difficult to keep up with current business trends?

Coming soon: A New Resource for your ‘learning fix’!

This February Kreate TV will be launching exclusively in partner with WEventSource.com whereby local experts in a wide variety of business-related fields will share some of their expertise and knowledge with you on a regular basis.

Each of these experts will be sharing valuable tips and tricks, new trends in the marketplace, time-saving efficiency techniques, ways to save both time and money, and well, we don’t want to ruin it, so you’ll just have to wait and see what is in store for you soon!

Keep checking back later this month for updates about our contributing personalities and ‘their story’ about how they came to be!

Julian Michael
Founder at Kreate Media & Productions

LinkedIn Buys Business Card Converter CardMunch, Will Offer Its Services For Free

by Alexis Tsotsis for Tech Crunch

In perhaps one of the most like-minded and forward-thinking acquisitions I’ve ever seen, career-driven social network LinkedIn has bought CardMunch, a Shoeboxed-like startup that scans your business cards and accurately converts them into phone contacts using Mechanical Turk. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

From the CardMunch blog:

“Our long-term vision for CardMunch has been to help manage business contacts and help you to leverage your contacts and connections for doing business. With that in mind, we are thrilled to announce today that CardMunch is now a part of LinkedIn! LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network and as such, provides the perfect platform for us to execute the CardMunch vision.

That’s not all; we have even more good news! Starting today, the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free! Yes, you heard right, the current version of the CardMunch app is now a free service, which means that you can capture and transcribe as many business cards as you like, free of charge.”

The best part of this deal is that the CardMunch business card scanning services, which used to cost $2.99 for the app and .25 cents per card after the first 10 cards, will now be offered for free with a refund offered to people with pre-existing credits.

Seeing as getting a leg up in the social game is all about the social graph a.k.a your contacts list, this could prove to be a very wise move for LinkedIn as people are now incentivized to upload their business contacts for utilitarian purposes, effectively social networking lead gen.

The company says that they will be adding new features in the coming months and may require users to “use their LinkedIn accounts to access CardMunch.” Exactly.

You can download the application gratis here.

About Card Munch:

CardMunch is a mobile business card transcription service that leverages the human power to accurately digitize contact information.

The CardMunch application automatically recognizes, captures, transcribes, and creates the contact in the user’s phone, straight from a business card. Instead of relying on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), CardMunch uses a scalable human workforce to transcribe each business card and verify the accuracy of the transcription before returning them to the mobile phone as a contact.

The service is available on the iPhone today. Support for other mobile platforms will come soon.

Facebook Moves Everyone Over to New Layout

by WEventSource staff

After seeing a friendly introduction to the ‘new’ Facebook design last month, we’re now bombarded with having no choice whatsoever to move over to the new Facebook layout!

“I guess we have no choice but to learn the new layout,” is what everyone I’ve been speaking with lately has been sharing.

What a machine. For entertainment sake I have been joking around with colleagues by referring to Facebook as ‘The Republic of Facebook’ with one heck of a parliament!

Most of the people I know are completely satisfied with the new profile, especially with how easy it is to now construct your status updates as a ‘link’, or ‘photo’, etc, and that the ‘send message’ button is much easier to find.

However, re-learning how to edit and reconstruct your page or business page is a whole different cookie! Facebook has gone into their site and decided to completely overhaul their past editing setup, adding in a couple new features, like a scroll bar that determines which page is your ‘landing page’ for people to visit upon first reaching your page.

More updates on this topic coming soon. For now, learn as much as you can before they change it again! lol

-JM

Find the Best Groups to Spend Your Time With

by Julian Michael

“It’s not what you know but who you know that makes the difference.”
- Anonymous (or fill in your favorite relative’s name here)

The more, the merrier. Right?

Or maybe I should network everywhere and hope to get lucky and meet that right contact or new client? (Ah-em!)

Ask yourself continually, “Did the groups I’ve been associating myself with turn out to be a profitable effort for me and my business? Was I able to connect with people easily and were they making strategic introductions that led to a new power partner, new business or the like?“

For some industries it truly is a numbers game. For others they only need a few or a couple of the right type of client, and there are only a few places or types of associations to meet the ideal set of contacts.

This month the best thing you can do for yourself is surround yourself with your target market and/or surround yourself with people who are in direct line with your target market so you are building the right type of relationships to start the New Year. What I’ve heard and seen many professionals and small business owners do is continually go back to the same networking groups because they enjoy their self, or because they feel they have some sense of loyalty to the group, yet the group was or is not an ideal fit for them and their business model.

Don’t cheat yourself of time well spent!

So many of us, and raise your internal hand if you’re guilty of doing this, but we’ve said to ourself, “Oh! This group is only a 90-minute or two hour meeting and I get a nice meal and met a couple nice people. Except every time I go I don’t really learn anything, everyone is always trying to sell me something instead of building strategic relationships, and no one has any idea how to refer me!“

What I’ve shared during some of my talks is that this 90-minute meeting is actually a FIVE-hour commitment! Five hours!? “How do I come up with that!?” Easy.

- An average of 30-minutes to arrive and park for most of us, each direction
- 15-30min early and 15-30min following the meeting to connect with others
- 30-60min getting ready (if it’s a morning group)
- 1-2hours of follow up and 1-to-1′s from each meeting
Total: 3.5 hours, plus the 90-minutes, for a total of 5 hours!

Check into new events! Try reaching out to new groups! And for your business’ sake, make sure you’re where you need to be before committing all your apples this January!

“Was reading this ‘time well spent’?”

JM

Julian Michael is creator of WEventSource and Kreate Media & Prouctions, LLC, which hosted nearly 40 networking events in 2010 that offered strategic advice, networking opportunities, business relationship building and learning new trends and tools through a significant list of prsenters.

Groupon Turns Down Google!

After Failing To Acquire Groupon, Google Said To Be Sniffing Around Smaller Rivals
Originally posted on TechCrunch.com

Google wants to be in the online group buying space, badly, and with good reason. The company may have not succeeded in purchasing the current leader in the space, Groupon, which has spurned a $6 billion buy-out offer in a bid to stay independent and shoot for the stars, but it seems determined to get in on the action – through acquisition – regardless.  read the whole article

Some insight
Groupon has been making serious waves in taking advantage of group consumer buying practices, something that was super foreign to the average consumer just a couple years ago. In talking with one of Groupon’s lead Seattle-based sales reps I found out that they’ve been growing at a massive rate, even locally!

Since 2009 they’ve added over 10 Million unique visitors per month to their website!! Whoa! This amount of traffic recently posted their company valuation at $4.75Billion and they just raised another HUGE round of funding estimated at near $950Million, which will

In fact, Groupon’s Seattle team is turning down nearly 8 of 9 offers they receive, making it SUPER exclusive to get ‘featured’ on their website as a retailer or service provider. And since they’re the industry standard, they’re able to charge the highest fees in the business, taking 50-percent of each deal paid for (many sites take less than this). But hey, there’s only one Starbucks or McDonalds.

-JM

Get into ‘Mobile’ or get left behind!

Dec 3, 2010

Two years ago all I heard was ‘Facebook’ this and ‘Twitter’ that.

Now all I hear is ‘GPS’ this, and ‘Mobile’ that. It’s just amazing!

If you currently don’t own a smartphone and do business you should seriously alter your perspective and get one asap or you’ll get left behind! There are so many options with roughly 100,000 ‘Apps’ available for consumers to choose from on their Droid, I-Phone, Curve or Blackberry, for example.

And this is not to mention the increasing market share of the laptop market that the ‘I-Pad’ has impacted. I-Pad is now being launched into the ‘Verizon’ sector, which will skyrocket the number of I-pad users as many loyal Verizon customers who didn’t want to make the I-phone jump will now have access to the first Apple mobile or online product offered outside of the AT&T platform…cool!

Download apps! Lots of them. And use them. These are made by some of the brightest and wittiest minds out there and they’re thinking just like you, “How can I get ‘this’ or ‘that’ done easier, more efficiently, or with less complexity??” And they’re spot on with their apps!

More mobile stuff coming…just needed to vent a little.

JM

What is ‘Profitable’ Networking?

Power Networking. Efficient Networking. Smart Networking.

These terms seem similar but are quite different from one another. Just the other day I had the opportunity to speak to a professional group on the south end about networking and I think I took some of them by surprise telling them that they needed to network less!

“Get out there and figure out where your time is best spent,” I shared with this audience,” and spend a majority of your time there!” Sounds simple, but there are so many people that attend several events every week or month that continue to produce the same ‘in-efficient’ results, yet their continue to go back. Not sure what motivates these people to continue being loyal to groups and associations that are a misuse of their time, but almost every day I meet a couple people that fall into this category.

Be Strategic and ‘Network less’!

Who has a strategy for purchasing a home? Who has a business plan? How about a personal fitness strategy or plan? Well what about networking??

Daily I meet those that are attending events ‘hoping’ to meet that next great client or power partner, which many of us do. However, put yourself in the right rooms that feature a ’1 in 5′ chance versus a ’1 in 50′ chance of meeting the right type of person.

Think about who your end user is – another key thing I see is that many times people are networking with a group that doesn’t mingle or connect often with your/their target market. They cannot afford your services and don’t know anyone that fits into that category as well, and this happens often.

-Julian Michael