Greater Baltimore Technology Council Power Networking Event

My firm is a member of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council. I attended the GBTC Meet the Members Power Networking event yesterday in Columbia, MD. Of the dozen or so search engine advertising accounts I'm currently managing, only one company (Hedwin Corporation) is actually in Maryland. I'd like to do business with more local companies. Conducting so much business online and over the phone, it's good to attend local business events. I enjoy learning about companies and their business models. I think that's partly why I enjoy search engine advertising. In order to figure out the best keywords to buy using Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, I need to learn about a business and the industry it operates within.

The GBTC power networking event was well structured. Seated around tables of 11, we had the chance to meet 10 other people at a given table. We had 15 minutes to go around the table and give our pitch and then exchange business cards. I learned about 30 companies as we rotated to new tables twice. What could have been better? Well, it would have been useful to know ahead of time how long we had to pitch our companies. I guessed 30 seconds so had a rough idea what I'd say for 30 seconds. We actually had 60 seconds. I don't think I ever used the full time, while others went well beyond 60 seconds in a few cases. Not a big deal.

I definitely need to work on my elevator pitch. It was interesting to hear what others had to say about their companies and how they presented their pitches. That alone made the event useful for me. Digging through my stack of business cards, here are some of the organizations I found interesting:

• Netrino
• NetGlo
• Offit|Kurman
• Visions Marketing
• World Trade Center Institute

That reminds me - one other item that might make this type of networking event better would be to have a list of attendees, either a hard copy or sent via email, which includes websites and/or email contacts. It wasn't possible to meet with all of the companies. At any rate, it was another well organized event from the GBTC.

Tags (byo w/ TagBuildr): greater baltimore technology council, gbtc, power networking, business, elevator pitch