Last night we had the Smaller Indiana 4,000 Member Party! What was once a twinkle in Pat Coyle and Doug Karr’s minds is now a reality. Over a year old, Smaller Indiana is boasting 2,000 – 3,000 hits a day and moving from a membership of 35 people in August of 2007 to 4,400 in January 2009.
The concept of Smaller Indiana is to make ideas findable in the State of Indiana. The idea was to build a community of business owners, employees, employers, artists, writers, musicians and every type of creative individual to stop Indiana’s brain drain and put Indiana on the MAP!
The party was excellent and it reminded me of the power of taking your online relationships to an offline environment. The whole concept of networking is to build relationships with individuals who could potentially be a client or a referral partner (better the referral partner).
I will always encourage clients and individuals attending our seminars to try and take your online relationships to an offline environment. We are all human. We all crave that face to face interaction. Online networking can only go so far but if you combine the two….
Magic.
And not the Disney World kind of magic but the “successful” kind of magic.
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Kyle -
It was a pleasure to meet you and everyone else I had the opportunity to chat with. It’s amazing how quickly the offline relationship develops out the online relationship. Like you said – Magic!
Smaller Indiana would not be anything if it weren’t for the effort that folks like you have put into it, Kyle. You’ve really had a HUGE impact in building that community and you deserve to take credit for it.
Personally, I’ve probably touched a couple hundred of those folks – but you’ve been coaching and encouraging thousands on SI. That’s the greatest thing about social media – if it weren’t for the users, you would never have success.
Thank YOU for SI’s success. It was good to see you last night. I owe you big time.