Essential Content For Meeting People (from SXSW)

It’s Monday of the SXSW experience. So far it’s been an amazing journey and I’ve been collecting content and ideas for you including an interview with Guy Kawasaki, a write up of the Jonathan Fields and Chris Guillebeau talk, details of Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk, the low down on the men with pens party, the Copyblogger writer’s party and a video interview with Pam Slim.

Oh yes, there’s content galore all with a dollop of copywriting and content marketing on the side.

So today we’re going to keep it light and practical and I’m going to share with you the content you want to prepare to help communicate your message when you’re in a conference setting.

Your elevator speech

Write this down. Then practice saying it out loud, then tell some other people. Don’t stand on a street corner, mouth wide open and flustered in front of Pam Slim as you try and get those words you have on paper out of your mouth. Write it down and practice this.

Bios of people you want to connect with

If you know that there are people you would like to connect with, spend some time finding out about them. Go to their websites, print off their about pages and read as much as you can about them without getting overwhelmed.

Interview questions

If you can arrange an interview with the people you want to connect with prior to the conference work up some interview questions and make sure they relate to something your audience is interested in as well as something your interviewee wants to talk about.

Quick interview questions

Sometimes you might bump into someone and it would be a perfect opportunity to do a quick interview, so have some quick questions on hand that you could ask anyone. Good questions to ask are why they are at the conference, one questions relating to your area of expertise, and a chance for them to talk about whet they’re working on next or how people can find out more about them.

Blog post ideas

This might be more natural for some more than others, but if you’re at a conference, have a notebook where you can jot down ideas for blog posts based on what you’re seeing or listening to. Don’t trust yourself to remember the important points after the fact.

 

Let me know if you have any other content that you like to prepare for conferences, otherwise I’ll see you on Thursday for our next Hot Spot!