Ten ways to market your new organization's events

I'm giving a talk on May 22 (today!) at the Ann Arbor IT Zone (Ann Arbor SPARK) on "New marketing". Here are some notes from that talk, which I'm sharing here in advance of actually writing it.

So here are ten ways to market your new organization's events; or, how to grow a group one person at a time, with examples from how the a2b3 weekly bi bim bop lunch group has evolved over two years. More to the point these are mostly quotes that I hope to work in along the way.

UPDATE: here's the presentation as I gave it:

1. Start small.

Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

2. Establish a theme

If you are interested in a weekly bi bim bop tour of Ann Arbor, join the Yahoo group a2b3 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a2b3 . The idea is to get a group together who would hit one B^3 place each week until the tour was complete. I'm pretty sure it would take a whole semester to make one round.

3. Build a rhythm

February is the season of small sorrows when everyone feels middle-aged even if you are 16, but there are cures for this. One is skating and another is the convivial lunch. (Garrison Keillor)

4. Start a mailing list

Welcome to an example of ridiculously easy group forming. I wanted to give a quick overview of ridiculously easy group forming. The Internet enables a relatively new thing, group forming. We're defining groups loosely as a number of people who get together persistently. That doesn't mean it's persistent over the years. A group of people might be defined by common interest. Working with groups, you might also find people that just like to hang out together. (Peter Kaminski)

5. Write about what you do

Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters. (Cory Doctorow)

6. Collect and keep supporters

My file is quite long now. Every time I think of somebody who has done something that I might need at some point, they’re written in. And that means most people I know (and I don’t necessarily have to know them well to add them - just well enough to be able to contact them). I can add “works in an office” because I might need to know about the latest gadgetry one’s likely to find in a modern office, or “is a single mum” because I might need to know how a woman with young children would go about making ends meet these days, what with nursery fees and everything. In other words, no matter how trivial something may seem, it could well be useful. In fact, it’s the trivialities that are more likely to be useful because how often am I really going to need to know what it was like to sail across the Atlantic? (Sharon Jacobsen)

7. Automate everything

I'm particularly interested in innovative, non-traditional, obscure, or weird ways to keep yourself in sync. Is it all scribbled down on a three for a dollar pocket notebook from the dollar store? Is your life planning tracked in a set of wiki pages? Does your iPod whisper soothing reminders to you in the morning as you go to work? Is your next car maintenance date encoded in intricately beaded knotwork that you carry with you? I'm sure there are more. (vacuum)

8. Keep a calendar

I know this sounds highly improbable to many, however Yahoo always
has difficulties as Mercury approaches retrograde, it usually settles
down again during the retrograde period, and then turns sour again
just before it goes direct.

I'm not pretending that there is a scientific explanation for this,
but it is surprising how often that it is the case.

For those who may be interested, Mercury turns retrograde on the 22nd.

(Rodney Smith)

9. Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen

The other story is about Harrison Owen, who spent a year producing a technical conference with keynotes, panels, white papers and poster sessions, only to fall into a funk after it was over, when he realized that the coffee breaks had been more stimulating than the structured sessions. Taking that instinct seriously, Owen designed a conference format that self-organizes, called Open Space.

Open Space sometimes freaks people out a bit, because it trusts participants so much. What do you mean, you're running a conference and you haven't laid out who is going to say what? You haven't put the leading experts on a dais? (Jerry Michalski)

10. Let the group divide to grow

"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar." Robin Dunbar, quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point

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