promoting the great speakers we get at my user group
Generally a day or so before our meetings, if I'm not happy with the # of rsvps, I pull out all the stops out and send one last email blast to my whole mailing list for Vermont.NET. With the unbelievable array of speakers we have managed to lure to Vermont, I often find myself referring to them as gurus, legends, etc. They tend to hate that. I remember Ken Getz making me take those words off of the website and the flyer I had created and replace them with “book author“ or something like that. I like to refer to him as “swami” now. There are people who give me shit for what looks like big time grovelling and hero worship, which, c'mon, it just is not that. But it's not just marketing either. I'm sorry but it's my way of being supportive of my peers. And when you are dealing with a lot of people who don't have the kind of exposure to information that we do here in this community and who don't get to go to conferences, they sometimes really don't know who some of these people are. Yes, it's true. Luckily the folks in my user group trust that when I say someone is “freakin' awesome” that they truly are. In fact, our September speaker might not be as well known to the average VB user or web developer, but when I explained to my group who he was and what his background was, it really got a great crowd of people to show up and every single one of them was thrilled that they had come to the meeting.