This week at my local networking group meeting, it was my turn to give one of the featured member presentations. The featured member gets 10 minutes at a pre-assigned meeting to describe their business. I have made a presentation to this group a couple of times before so a good portion of the people already knew of me.
The meeting starts at 8 AM (before everyone has a chance to finish a full cup of coffee) and I did not want to give a boring presentation. Instead of a simple show-and-tell presentation, I created a quiz about recognizing logos corresponding to technology tools. I use a variety of the tools on everyday basis and I thought I could share my knowledge in a way that would be interactive and hopefully fun.
The worksheet for the quiz was not hard to make. It took a little bit of time to find the logos that I wanted to display. I added 24 logos images to a Word document and left a space under each logo where people could write their guess of the company name or tool that it corresponded to. At 11 pm the night before the meeting, I printed out 20 copies of the worksheet, collected a few extra pens and I was ready for action.
I did not expect that the meeting attendees would know all of the logos that I displayed. I thought some of the logos were going to be easy to guess and some would be more of a challenge. When the group completed the 2 minute quiz we discussed the answers together.
As an experiment, I put my own logo in the quiz to see if there was any brand recognition from all the meetings that I have been attending with this networking group over the last few years. There result was a mixed bag. To my dismay only a few people shouted out “Silver Hoop Edge” when it was time to discuss my logo. I think I need to do a better job of reinforcing my branding at future meetings.
I knew that just seeing the technology tool logos and matching the names would not really be useful to most people. (especially if they haven’t been using the tools previously) Therefore, I set up a landing page on the Silver Hoop Edge website. On the landing page I put the name of the each tool, how to get to the website of the tool, how to find out about cost, and what the purpose was for the tool. I created the page so that following the meeting, even after I gave out the answers to the quiz, the attendees could go on my website and grab the information that they needed.
As I was preparing the content for the landing page I thought I could put all the quiz answers in one space i.e. just as one big list of information. However, since Conductor (a custom WordPress function) is already installed on my website, it occurred to me I could probably use Conductor to enhance the display of all the collection of quiz answers.
RESOURCE: Learn about how Conductor works to “curate your own unique collections of content on any page”
Attendees were good sports even though they were asked to complete a quiz early in the morning. I brought along a prize for the participants who had the most number of correct answers. Two people had 66% of the answers correct. I hope people walked away with something that they can really use rather than just information about my business.
It turns out the meeting activity was a great marketing exercise for me. Additionally, the opportunity also involved using two tools that I am always trying to get work more efficiently on client projects: (1) creating custom post types and (2) displaying collections of content using Conductor plugin.
All in all, I was able to offer some educational content to my networking group cohorts while sharpening my own skills. I considered the presentation to be positive and productive.
Warning: WordPress Jargon Ahead
Here is a basic list of the steps I used to create the landing page:
- Set up a new CUSTOM POST TYPE called “Trivia”.
- Put the content for my 25 posts into a spreadsheet so I could quickly import it using WP All Import another time-saver WordPress plugin.
- Created a new PAGE called “CNJ Trivia”
- Activated Conductor to control the “CNJ Trivia” PAGE
- Added a Note widget to display two introductory sentence for the PAGE
- Added a Conductor Widget to display many “Trivia” posts in the Portfolio Display format (available in Symphony Pro theme).
- Since there were a few custom fields to display, I used the Conductor custom fields add-on to manage those.
I played around a little bit with customizing the Conductor widget’s design (creating a CSS class) but decided I wanted to keep it simple and it didn’t really need much decoration to accomplish my goal.
View the resulting landing page I created to complement the networking group quiz.