On November 18, 2010 I attended The B.I.G. (Business Innovation and Growth) Summit at The Peabody Orlando. This event attracted a number of entrepreneurs and business leaders from the Central Florida region as it is Orlando's premiere event for business, innovation and growth. Some of the speakers at the event included Nick Friedman, President and Co-Founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk, Leslie Hielema, President of Orlando, Inc., and Bert Jacobs, Chief Executive Optimist of The Life is Good Company.
Classmates and I attended the summit with our teacher, Kate Hartig. I learned a great deal about networking at this event, as there were a number of different businesses present. I spoke with these businesses to see the opportunities they had available as I was interested in potential jobs or volunteer positions.
After watching some of the speakers, we broke into "Innovation Workshops", which I found very helpful. I attended the "Mining for New Customers by Leveraging Technology" workshop. This workshop taught me a lot about social networking and how to use it to conduct market research. We were exposed to a number of different techniques, such as using Facebook Ads to estimate your target reach based on customers location and interests. Workshop panelists emphasized the importance and strength of social media. This workshop really opened up my eyes to start looking at social networking outside of personal use. Social networking is such a powerful tool and can be extremely effective when starting a business and looking for new customers.
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