Yesterday I gave a free presentation covering the basic concepts of SEO for members and prospective 
members of the Morrisville, NC Chamber of Commerce. I really enjoy these events for several reasons.
- I get to shake hands. If you spend too much time on the Internet and not in front of actual human beings you can lose your edge.
- I witness learning. Making a presentation to a group that is truly interested in the subject matter and has a vested interest in paying attention is exciting. I would recommend we all get out and teach from time to time.
- I see introspection. Most people are surprised at how they are forced to look at all of their marketing efforts and the continuity of their message once they see the detail of Internet marketing. Although this can be disturbing to some because of the amount of work it can create it often serves as the kick in the pants needed to get someone out of a rut.
- I get to show passion. I like what I do and how it helps people. While some passion and emotion can be conveyed through decent writing there’s nothing like making an important point while looking in someone’s eyes and speaking the emotion that importance carries.
- I start and renew relationships. When you meet people in person you start or rekindle a real relationship which can be very powerful. Many don’t like to hear this but online relationships are limited. It’s too easy thus making it less deep in most cases. You can agree or not, it’s a free Internet.
Get out in front of people as soon as you can and breathe some life into your work life. People make the difference. When you look into a person’s eyes while talking to them, there is something that occurs that no online experience can recreate. Seek that out more.
FT Takeaway: Get in front of people for real. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter and other ways to communicate are not completely real. Go ahead and scream “Not true!” but you know it is.
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It’s hard to beat a little real “face time” every once in awhile, isn’t it. It’s amazing how we interact with people so differently in the flesh. And that can also inform that way we treat them when we are dealing with them online.
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My prediction is that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will have to have a death-match!
Many of the people I talk to (who are still employed, like me) say they don’t a have time to do them all. They’re actually overworked. And about the last thing they need to do is get constant updates on the minutia and idiosyncratic rear-end scratching of people they haven’t seen for ten years.
And, Face-to-Face may be making a come-back. I do Virtual Tours and my hosting provider now has “listened to its customers.” Now, it offers a “chat box,” where you can get a (sort of) human being response to your techie problems, as opposed to an out-of-sync email response 3 days after the problem.