I personally believe I’m not great at networking – I tend to be a little shy, my interests are primarily technical and IT related, so it doesn’t give me much general stuff to chat about and I perpetually sound like I’m terrified. With saying this, even though I see people who carry themselves much better than I do, I still seem to have some reasonable success through networking. Sometimes I think my nervous nature helps me attract outgoing, extroverted people who can’t bear to see someone cowering in the corner by themselves.

Getting back to the topic, Lisa Butler gave a few good points and spoke well, but didn’t really present anything new – most of it was text-book networking stuff, but if you had never networked before, I’m sure you would have learnt a few things.

Even though I may seem terrified and I didn’t learn much from this evening, I ended-up speaking with more people than I usually do and, as always, I had a great time. The venue was also great (a personal favorite of mine) – The Press Club.

Here are a couple of pics with me – more photos from the night available here :

The evening was held at Riverlife providing us with a beautiful backdrop of the CBD at night and some very tasty nibblies provided by Zen Catering.

The panel of speakers included:

* Adam Arndell, General Manager, 5iveSenses Experiential Pty Ltd
* Simon Kenworthy-Dell, Managing Director, Straight Edge
* Danielle Geddes, CEO, Riverlife Adventure Centre

All of which did a great job educating and entertaining us with real-life examples of how to provide your clients with experiences that will make them keep coming back.

Each and every one of the Networx events I’ve attended have been good, but this particular evening was excellent (and to make things even better, I won a prize in the business-card draw too).

Here are some photo’s from the evening.

The venue was the Brisbane Powerhouse and speakers included Emma Blackwood (a news editor from Austereo), Amanda Fitzgerald (a news journalist and presenter from Network Ten), Daniel Sankey (chief of staff at brisbanetimes.com.au), Heather McWhinnie (an editor from bmagazine), and Sophie Gatward (the promotions and marketing director also from Austereo).

They answered questions about how best to liaise with the media, how to submit good PR articles, what they look for in PR submissions and a bunch of other things that we don’t really do at Ingenuity.

I know that all businesses should embrace the media and we should probably do a bit more of it… but we’ve found great success in word-of-mouth and online marketing.

Despite not being a topic of great interest, the networking benefits were still very good and there hasn’t been a Networx night I haven’t enjoyed.

Looking forward to the next event in a couple of weeks time on Sensory Marketing – Branding through Experiences.