I am delighted to have been the originator and part of this morning's meeting, which proved to be historical one for both for BNI and for Twitter!
(If you'd like to find out about BNI, click here)
I use Twitter a lot - I love chatting to people, learning new things and building relationships. Find me @maudalleyne
When the snow started falling yesterday, it became clear we were not going to have our usual BNI Meeting this Wednesday morning.
It suddenly dawned on me that we could use Twitter as the perfect platform to have our usual conversations, 60 seconds introduction and the rest of the meeting.
This would also mean that the meeting would be public so everyone else would see what we are be up to, which can attract potential 'visitors' referrals and more importantly we would have a meeting and potential business instead of nothing.
And it would be fun and certainly different!
The main challenge was that up until about 4pm yesterday only a handful of the 30+ people who are members of the Croydon BNI Chapter were active on Twitter or knew anything about it at all.
I emailed our chapter Director @Shabbirhalai with the idea, just before 2pm yesterday afternoon. He loved it. We started telling the rest of the Chapter just after 3pm and decided to go public on Twitter too.
The momentum certainly built up hugely last night. So much so that Dr Ivan Misner himself (founder of BNI) was told about our experiment and loved the idea. We had people from all over the world congratulating us and wishing us well.
I spent the night setting people on Twitter and giving them very basic training, explaining hashtags, dowloading tweetdeck - the minimum they needed to take part this morning, whilst Shabbir spent even longer making his usual BNI script 'Twitter Friendly'.
It ended up being a brilliant night for building relationships between us in the Chapter on Twitter and meeting lovely new people from around the world.
From 6.30am until 8.45am this morning - the meeting took place, amazingly, brilliantly conducted by Shabbir! 15 members were present as well as a couple of visitors and many 'onlookers'.
60 seconds became 120 seconds to allow for typing time, strap lines were said and brilliantly completed and the usual banter was most certainly present.
The feedback from members of the Chapter has been amazing but here are some tweets from 'others'
"Thanks much again for having me as visitor, great tweet-meet! Great job"
"good morning #bnicroydon well done, i will continue to follow"
"#BNICroydon Well done to all. A great BNI Tweeting and thanks for letting us join in from Ireland & the world! Great business being passed 2"
"Just seen the #bnicroydon tweetmeet. Fantastic idea! Making the best of a bad situation"
"It's fantastic to see people using social media to keep biz going when everyone else takes 2 bed!"
"Congratulations #bnicroydon with your 1st ever BNI meeting on twitter. It was clearly a great success. So sorry that I missed it."
"Well what an awesome start to the day! I've just taken part in a landmark BNI Tweet Meet with #bnicroydon as a visitor from Redhill"
"#bnicroydon great idea to have a BNI Tweetmeet instead of battling the snow! #BNICaterham applaud u!"
"Thinking of people I know in the area who I can send along to such a great chapter. Worked for 2 yrs betw Cranford and Norbury"
"it was inspired and hopefully a trend setting event for BNI."
All in all a fantastic experience - I would highly recommend this to other networking groups, but I am very glad we were the 1st!!
GO BNI - GO TWITTER - GO CROYDON!
Maud from thebestofCroydon
