Why I go for as many events & meetups as I can.

Heard of an upcoming event, meetup or conference? Go for it!

A common question I get is: "You seem rather busy at work, so why don't you skip the events and stuff?"

Thing is, going for events - forums, conferences, meetups, talks, etc., does help me in my work. This is especially so since I'm a communicator (I write a lot) and am an individual contributor. Getting out there keeps me up to date on what's going on and also serves as a learning experience; meet more people and take the chance to learn from them! Sure, it eats up time in a busy schedule but the benefits outweigh it all. So I make decisions and make time. It's all about prioritisation, discipline and time management.

Here are the 3 big reasons as to why I'll say "go for it!" if a relevant event presents itself to you.

(1) The Patience Game: Keep Your Head In It Till You Get It

If you're part of a lean team, are an individual contributor, or are a communications specialist like myself, exposing yourself to your industry helps catalyse your learning process.

I ghost write in my job. Yet, when I started out, I knew nothing about the financial services industry, credit ratings, IoT, network connectivity and the likes. I'm no expert now, but the more I listen and read, the more I get it, the better I can curate content around it. It's the same as how marketers should know their product inside out. Communications specialists (and every employee...) should strive to be experts of their products and community advocates.

The first Managing Director I worked with told me that "even if you do not understand at first, just keep reading. Keep at it and one day, you will understand." I took that advice and it has been working for me so far! We just gotta keep learning. Go listen to the keynotes, the panels, engage in round table discussions even if you're no expert - you'll gain a lot more than you'd think.

"... even if you do not understand at first, just keep reading. Keep at it and one day, you will understand."

(2) The Listening Challenge: What Makes Your Community Tick?

I also attend events to observe communities - likened to the 'covert observation' method in the user empathy phase in design thinking. When I go for industry events, knowing my target persona is present in the room, I look out for the following:

• What are the questions that the audience asks? Are there common themes?
• How do people react? When do they whip out their phones to snap a picture? What is their body language like?
• Where do crowds go? What activities, formats and topics hold their interest for longer?

It's all about finding out what makes your community tick. Once you get an understanding of that, coming up with topics to curate content about or an angle to form your storyboard/sales pitch around gets a lot easier!

(3) Build Social Capital: "Work" the Community

While this might seem like an obvious reason to go for events, this is also the part that gets me slightly out of my comfort zone. Reality is that I'm not exactly the most senior person in the room, nor am I in the thick of the "business side of things".

It takes the mustering of courage to be confident and practice your networking skills, when most of the room is a lot more experienced than you. Once you do that, you'll realise that you have no reason to feel intimidated - everyone's human! Also, the more you do this, the more people you know, the easier this becomes at the next event!

As we find ourselves in an economy of trust, relationships and familiarity do matter. The more meaningful and genuine connections you make, the better you're able to do things, the more you're able to add value to others; even if it's introducing someone to another!

I started pushing myself to attend more events to steepen my learning curve and it's been wonderful so far! For example, after sitting through a half-day workshop earlier this week, I now have more than 10 potential topics to curate content about for my brand's digital channels.

Where do I get wind of what to attend? I seed myself into the mailing lists of industry conference producers as well as depending on what topics I'm interested in. I definitely recommend staying tune to what the likes of Found., WeWork and HubSpot put out there - love the high engagement levels and organic conversations that spin off in their community events. I'm happy to point you to places too; Eventbrite aside, I keep tabs on Facebook (the events tab is rather powerful), Meetup.com and even Couchsurfing's events section.

Do you find attending events useful? What works for you? Where do you go to get inspiration? Let me know!