Why It’s Important to Meet Other Affil...
A couple summers ago, I met this cat at Affiliate Summit East. Since then we’ve talked more on the Internet, and even partnered on a few ventures and had some moderate success. We also met up occasionally at conferences too. Last week, he happened to have some time available so he came up to chill in Canada for about 9 days. My friends and I took him out to some local clubs, and showed him a bit of the scenery by going to my cottage up in Quebec. Had some camp fires, he did some fishing with a friend of mine, and generally shot the shit.
Basically he got the full Canadian experience. Including but not limited to real beer, seeing bears and deer in the wild north, eating poutine, French pornography on TV at all hours of the day and of course Canadian Cigarettes.
Now, you may be wondering, why is this important?
It’s Simple, Really…
Face to face conversations generally mean much more than any electronic mediums – especially when building business relationships. Why do you think that people still fly from New York to Tokyo to meet business associates, sometimes even for seemingly unimportant meetings? That’s right, it’s because more can get discussed, drawn on napkins, explained with hand gestures or even reading micro expressions in person than online. All of this obviously leads to stronger relationships, and ultimately more money down the road.
While it’s easy to converse using instant messaging, telephone and other electronic methods they aren’t always the best. Talking face to face, often leads to more in-depth discussions, and aides in the level of trust that each person or business entity gives to each other. Not to mention the fact that it seems every cat in this industry has ADD or ADHD, so jumping back and forth from topic to topic in real life can be easier to follow than online with the constant scroll. It sounds silly, but if you think about it I think you’ll probably realize it’s true for you too – why else would you pay all that money to attend the various conferences?
I do think that electronic communications are great for quick ‘hey, what was that offer again’ type things, but when getting right down to discussing business more can be accomplished in 2 hours of talking over beer than often can be done with 10 hours of IRC or Instant Messaging.
I think we got more conducted in 9 days, than we had for the past 2 to 3 months online. For real.
Why did I write this post? Because I think that many in the industry, especially the younger folk take face to face meetings for granted, and would prefer everything to be electronic. When I was younger, I remember my dad telling me to ‘make friends with your banker, don’t do everything electronically’ and that advice has saved me thousands of dollars. The same principle applies to affiliates or any business really. Getting to know someone in real life is better than just being a client number or contact on MSN.
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