Can we improve the quality of business conversation?
The web is good for somethings.
If I have a spanner, but don’t have a nut that fits – the internet will help me find nuts and someone who can supply them – quickly and cheaply. Great!
But, if I have a business and that business is not growing how I want it to grow – can the internet help? No, not really. I can’t search for ‘business growth’ and expect to find the solution.
So, for product buying the internet is great – but where the solution is not yet defined – or where they may be multiple possible solutions – then the internet doesn’t really work.
Square hole – square shape
Do you remember that child’s game where the child has a plastic table with different shaped holes in it? And the purpose is to find the blocks that fit each different shape? So, the round shape goes in the round hole, the star shape in the star hole and the square shape in the square hole?
Well, the internet (or database searching on the internet) is rather like the square shape, square hole problem solving.
But can it go further?
May be it can – and this is the key aim of the semantic web which seeks to find more subtle meaning in searches and matching.
But, the reality is that after more than a decade of email, massive increase in mobile telephony and wonderful google search algorithms, we still do business by meeting people – face to face – in a similar way.
So, as with so many things, can the internet replace our existing ways of working? No – but it certainly supplement with new ways of working and support existing ones more effectively.
In fact, the key benefit of face to face meetings isn’t reduced or replaced by the internet – so long as those face to face meetings are of a high quality.
And that is now the key question for any business meeting – how good (or what quality) were the conversations?
The low value meetings can easily be replaced by the ability of the internet – through search or social media – to match people.
Hence, Media Modo has been developing high quality face to face business events whilst seeking to use the internet to support and enhance the after-effect of those events. These events began with connecting freelancers in the creative, media, digital and marketing sector meeting potential hirers and entrepreneurs (Enterprise Freelance Fair) but will shortly expand to include face to face encounters between investors and start ups.
However, the key for both events is this – can we improve the quality of conversation?
We believe we can – and we do this via a mix of workshoping and pre-event profiling.
These two elements – combined – help to ensure that attendees are put in the right frame of mind to do business – and share a common language or grammar on how to talk to each other.
Okay, this sounds a bit technical – let me explain it more simply. How good are you at picking out the 5 best people to speak to in a room of 50 delegates? And, when you’ve found them, how do you make the few minutes of talk useful and directed to offering business problem solutions?
Well, even the very best networkers find this difficult – but if there was some way of doing this – without having to become an expert networker – then wouldn’t that improve the quality and value of the business event?
Okay – for this, Media Modo are developing unique profiling algorithms and training/ workshop structures and then integrating these into existing and new events.
If you’d like to know more or hear how we can help you improve your business events, then please get in touch.
