As you might expect with a workshop on on-line marketing looming I've being doing some reading around to make sure I'm up to date on current thinking - and a phrase that's cropped up a number of times is 'crowd-sourcing'. Essentially, this is the idea that the more people you can get involved in solving a problem or designing something the more likely you are to hit on a novel and effective result. I'm a little sceptical of how useful this is as I think the quality of results will always depend on the quality of your crowd, but I do think there's real value for independent consultants and small businesses generally in tapping in to the ideas and knowledge of other people.
In many ways this is the main benefit of networking, whether on-line or face to face. Other people have different approaches to life and business and the more new people you meet and exchange ideas with, the more chance you have of coming up with your own new ideas. I'm often amazed at just how varied the businesses are that I come across at networking events - and the stories of how people decided what business to start. I also find that approaching events with the aim of listening to other people's stories is much less daunting than going with the aim of selling and is generally more productive anyway!
We're very lucky at Skillfair to be able to use your collective experience and ideas to help us improve the service and come up with new ways to help you and other consultants. In that spirit we'd like to invite ideas for topics that you'd like to see covered at our conference in the autumn. It will be in London in November and we plan to use a similar format to last year, 3 or 4 short talks plus a variety of longer workshops, but we're really keen that the agenda should reflect the issues and problems you're interested in. So if you've seen a great speaker or have a topic that you think is worthy of a workshop session then please let us know
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