The Boston Black Professionals Meetup Group will be taking part in our next mixer.

Technorati Tags: boston meetup, black boston, boston networking

Our next Professionals of Color mixer will take place Thursday April 19 from 6:30pm-9:30pm at Parris Lounge inside the Quincy Market Building.  Two rounds of group speed networking will be included!

http://bostonoffline.com/EandEClub.shtml 

Technorati Tags: speed networking, business networking, black professionals, latino professionals, boston event

Three networking articles have been added to the E & E Club page. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: networking, network, professional development, relationship building

Tentatively for April 19 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm.

One of the best (not to mention first and most important) things to do after any event is to write down everything that was good, ok, and could be improved.

For example, the good included the venue, decor and number of attendees.

Ok was the networking.  Most took intiative to meet new people while a few stuck to talking only with the friends they came with.

Could be improved is the female to male ratio, particularly as this was a Valentine’s affair.  Not sure what can be done to change that as woman tend to attend these type of events more than men.

I make notes like these about each event Boston Offline Media is a part of to know what to repeat, what to avoid and what to improve for the next time.

Technorati Tags: event planning

There will be a small raffle half way throughout the mixer.  Right now the raffle list is one copy of Chocolate Covered Forbidden Fruit by Trista Russell and The Sex Chronicles by Zane.  More to come.

Technorati Tags: trista russell, zane, erotica noir

How time flies.  I remember thinking back in November that the next mixer seemed so far away.  Now it’s less than a month and the first e-blast has gone out.

Another year, another set of goals.  What will make me happy on January 1 of 2008 is

1. A mailing list increase of 200%
2. A mixer attendance increase of 30%
3. A web visitor increase of 900%

Actually achieving that is a different story.

I just got through reading Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s latest blog post on success and motivation and comments and it hits home harder than a juiced ball off a corked bat in the hands of Bary Bonds. I’ll probably end up reading that post a dozen more times.

Here are his #2 and 3 business rules:

Win the Battles you are in before you take on new battles; You can Drown in Opportunity

And my followup thoughts:

There isn’t a week that goes by a business idea pops into my head that I think will make a profit. If I got paid for ideas, I’d be a millionaire many times over. And as Cuban pointed out, these ideas can be exciting. Exciting for one reason: they are ideas. Ideas fundamentally are exciting. They are filled with hope, dreams, the unknown, unlimited potential.

Even though Boston Offline is far from a mature company, the thrill from registering the domain, designing the intial layout, getting business cards are all gone. This is where the work begins and work, as we know, can get boring. So the ideas try to take over the mind again. And those ideas distract from the battles already going. One of these ideas is to create an entertainment and recreation division. Organizing events like bowling nights or musical showcases on a regular basis. However the time spent on that would distract me from making our signature (and only) event, the E & E Club mixer, grow from an average of 40 ppl this year to 60 ppl next year and attract a half dozen sponsors which is no small feat.

Another idea is to add a deeper social networking component to this website. First of all that would require an increible amount of hours and money. Even with Content Management Systems to handle design, I’d have to provide or outsource tech support. Second, why the heck would anyone bother using it with MySpace, BlackPlanet, Migente et al. Could the idea work? Yes. It is a battle worth trying to win now? No.
All these ideas would pull the business focus away from its core competancy, an ethnic forum that provides advertising and promotions for local events and businesses. What I believe are the two core parts of this site, the event calendar and classifieds section are barely utilized yet. And these are free features! So if those features are still teething, why on earth should I be pumping out more babies. The most responsible action is to feed and nurture what is already out the womb.

(No more birth analogies, I promise. This is what happens when you post after 2am)