This week I was invited to a couple of speaking events, in their way both of them very different.

One of them was focused on organisations involved in ‘Direct Commerce’ within mail order and eCommerce. Attendees were a mixture of B2B/B2C and it was held at the UKs home of Rugby at Twickenham Stadium West of London.

For many of those attending it was an opportunity to meet with like minded people, discuss shared problems, solutions and opportunities. There was an obvious ‘buzz’ in the air, and the organiser told me that a lot of the feedback they had prior to the event was how many companies were looking for some ‘new thinking’, around how to grow their business.

The other event I attended was held in Central London, it was organised to help promote, empower, and build confidence in the workplace for Women. The organisers had invited a panel of women at varying stages of their ‘leadership’ journey to speak, and also asked me along because they firmly believe in diversity.

The panel ranged from women just starting out on their management journey through to middle management, and CEO.

When I asked the organisers of this event what the objective was, they told me they wanted to help impart knowledge and advice in a round table format to other women.

I have to say I loved both events, I was impressed by how many people and companies turned out at Twickenham Stadium for the day event, and how many people turned up at the evening event - and all just share knowledge, learn more, and network with new folks that could help them along their own journey.

I then read this story (link below) about Adidas who’ve chosen not to ‘buy in’ influencers but reach out to the consumer base and work with them to give them access to the worldwide Adidas consumer network, effectively turbo charging customers as advocates of the brand, the objective being very similar to the two different events I attended as described earlier.

Both of these events supported the fact that face to face is always going to be a key and important part in networking, building the knowledge base, and that events like this whilst an important part of building out potential opportunities I couldn’t help but think about a few questions I got asked during both of them, “how do I get started writing blogs”?

I had literally listened to story after story, I saw people and businesses take time out of busy lives to attend these events and they seemed to struggle with the concept of telling these stories via blogs on Social Media, and by empowering other team members across the entire business how much they could create a front of mind approach to helping people who are looking for help and advice.

Just like all those people who attended both these events.