If you have the opportunity to attend a work conference, you should definitely take advantage of it. First of all, it is a nice change of pace from your normal 9 to 5, but there are numerous other reasons why you should attend one.
Conferences allow you to learn more about your industry and to help find solutions to problems that you may be facing.
Besides new business ideas, conferences are great for networking with others in your profession. Networking allows you to find fresh ideas, get career advice and support, and developing long lasting personal relationships.
Maybe you did some networking at eGenerationMarketing’s annual cocktail party at the NOSSCR conference last week!
When you get back from a conference you should develop some sort of game plan to implement everything you learned. Here are some ways you take what you learned at a conference and put that into action.
Compile Your Notes From Each Session and Do a Write-Up
When you’re at a session, you are trying to write down as many things as you can while still paying attention to the speaker. When you get back, it is a good idea to compile everything that you wrote down and highlight a couple of big takeaways form that session.
If you are a person who likes to take pictures of the presenter’s slides, you should also include whatever is on those slides in your write up as well. When you break your write ups by session, that will help you remember the most important things you learned at each session.
The write ups will also be an ongoing reference to go back to when you want to start putting new ideas to use.
Follow Up with Connections on LinkedIn
Networking doesn’t end after the conference! Gather up all the business cards you accumulated and follow up with your new connections through LinkedIn. Remember to send them a little message that lets them know that you both spoke at the conference.
Pick 1 or 2 Things That You Learned That You Want to Implement
Conferences can be a bit hectic and exhausting depending on how many sessions you go to. Not all sessions are created equal. Some can be awesome with a lot of great takeaways and some can be busts where you don’t get much new information.
When you’ve compiled all of your notes from each session, pick 1 or 2 things that you actually want to implement. Think about what ideas resonated with you the most and what ideas would be best for your business.At eGenerationMarketing, one of our big takeaways from the annual Inbound marketing conference was to do more re-optimizing of old content on our site for SEO instead of just adding new pages of content for the sake of adding new content.
Share with Your Team
More likely than not, not everyone at your office was able to attend the same conference as you. Share key takeaways with those who weren’t able to attend and could benefit from what you’ve learned from that conference.
If your session speaker shared his or her slide decks, make sure to share those with your team members who weren’t there so they can see what exactly was presented.
Conclusion
Conferences are great, but how you implement what you’ve learned is the key to whether or not should you should go back to the conference you attended next year. NOSSCR is a great place to network with other attorneys and discover products and services that could make your firm more successful.
If you saw us at NOSSCR and you want to learn more about Social Security disability lead generation services, please give our office a call at 617-800-0089 to speak with one of our sales reps.representatives.