The final half-hour of my day begins with a pleasantly thoughtless dream-state triggered by the sound of the air purifier. I’m watching Margaret shuffle through papers and click through emails. She finishes and looks at me. When I notice her, I snap back into reality. For a minute, we just look at each other. She’s assembling her thoughts into coherent order. I’m thwacking my pen against my legal pad waiting to write. She blinks from behind her pink-framed glasses and under the piles of wild curls.
“So–” she blinks. “There’s this Women In Business Conference on Wednesday.”
“Are you going?”
“Yes. I think you should come. Do you want to go?”
Conferences will always be precious to me. I love them. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the bad drip coffee. The pre-printed nametags that always fall apart. Perhaps the wads of business cards warming my pockets and purse. Or the notoriously recurring microphone problems. Who knows? Nevertheless, they are special. I think of them as adventurous paths only the brave can tread to total fulfillment.
(My very first conference experience was sponsored by the Hartwick College Student Senate. They paid for me to represent our school at “Get Fired Up!” a student leadership conference held at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in early 2007. For two nights, we stayed in a hotel down the street, where drunken college debauchery ensued: this including not-so-secret trysts, poorly executed practical jokes, and a verbal-turned-violent argument over whether Jesus supported the death penalty when he wrote the Bible. I found it to be groundbreaking.)
I consented to come along. My hope was to make relevant observations in the background while Margaret did the networking. We met at Fins Coffee at 8:00 in the foggy morning, keen on avoiding the conference coffee.
We arrived. The Cocoanut Grove was curiously devoid of dudes. Our nametags were printed on stickers and we stood in line with high-heeled, suited women, who were all talking and laughing loudly in spite of the fact that the sun was barely up. I awkwardly affixed my sticker to my blazer. We took seats in the main room. Somebody got up to present the first speaker. Margaret opened her laptop and began to simultaneously respond to multiple emails, chat with developers in the office, and twitter the conference events. Guess I had better take some notes.
Laura Lowell spoke on marketing. She impressed us immediately with her ability to identify the more obvious truths about marketing which we sometimes miss. For instance, “Recognize that you have two types of people in your office. You have planners, and you have doers. If you are both, you may feel schizophrenic.” She also urged conference-goers to take an ethical approach with mistakes — don’t sweep them under the rug, because correcting them can improve the quality of your service and become a preventative measure against similar embarrassments in the future.
“Say No to Jargon” was a piece that made Margaret erupt in giggles among the otherwise silent guests. We knew exactly what she was talking about. When you work with websites, you read a lot about “industry-leading solutions” that take your “whatever” to “the next level”. Nobody knows what the solutions are, why they’re industry leading, where the next level is or who the heck lives there. However, based on how often jargon appears in marketing literature, you’d think it was all pretty special stuff. Too bad it means absolutely nothing.
I had exhausted my coffee so I went to see what the Cocoanut Grove had to offer. Drip coffee, regular and decaf, with corresponding black and orange handles, was available in four pots. This impressed me, but I was stunned by a woman who exclaimed with alarm that the hot coffee was melting the wax on the outside of her paper cup. I doubled them up, got my joe and helped myself to half-and-half, though I took issue with the cream being stored in un-chilled, un-covered carafes. Whatever. My standards aren’t that high. I hurried back to the conference room to catch the next speaker.
Karen Orton boasts no secret knowledge of online communities, but she does have an uncommon passion for them. Her presentation fishtailed nicely with the marketing presentation that came before it. She managed to reveal the marketing capacity of online communities, like Facebook. The charmingly simplistic Twitter was another example: its main feature allows you to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.
Awkwardness ensued when Karen endeavored to describe Twitter. After you log in, “you answer the question, ‘What are you doing?’ with a brief sentence. People are always sending out updates on what they’re doing. You can find other people on Twitter, and follow them. Yes, question.” A young shorthaired woman got the mic. She asked in exasperation, “Follow you where?” Women laughed sympathetically. Maybe we won’t get the whole room Tweeting before the day’s end.
Lunch was served none too early. Chinese chicken salads were served piled high on platters and after a moment, the servers swept the tables with handfuls of saran-wrapped snicker doodles. We were entertained by a final speaker while we digested.
Kirsten Mangers was dressed in an immaculate suit that did not betray the rawness of her character. She is blunt, sarcastic, and controversial, but most of all, she’s just plain fun: her jokes had the audience rolling. “We’re women, let’s face it: we’re smarter than anybody, of any other gender, out there, anywhere”. Her talk on advertising was insightful, though not directly relevant to Quiddities. She was my favorite speaker of the day regardless, because her talk was so totally in the spirit of the WIB Conference. She spoke as a businesswoman: who, like the rest of us, persevered even though she wasn’t always taken seriously. Like us, when old tactics stopped working, she tapped her creative strength to solve enduring problems. She did so without compromising her character or abandoning her femininity. It’s easy to see why some people may not like Kirsten. She is amicable with a dash of threatening mixed in. However, she certainly showed us that you don’t have to sacrifice who you are in order to succeed — you simply need to harness it.
Networking hour arrived. Immediately I noticed something strange. Conferences oftentimes engender competition: I have sat through many a workshop, watching two participants vying for control of the group’s loyalty, each trying to say their opinion louder than the other. This was different. Without restraint, I saw people enthusiastically reach out to each other. An exchange of cards blossomed into a conversational clique. For some weird reason, everyone was being supportive. How weird. A couple people even came up to me.
“I’m very interested to know, what is your company? I can’t see your nametag!”
“Um, I just work for Margaret,” I replied. (This turned out to be sufficient explanation; everybody at the conference knew who Margaret was.)
Cash bar was announced and we gathered our things, sure to grab a pair of sponsor goodie bags on the way out. As Margaret took me back to my car I decided the most important thing I took home from WIB was this: no longer does the corporate world need be all coldness and quotas. Now, we live in a world where everyone participates. The last edifices of the old conservative white guys in suits are crumbling. Our customers can follow us on Twitter, be our friends on Facebook, moderate our online support groups and make or break us with an online review in an instant. It’s probably time to get a little more creative than a thirty-second TV spot, and a little more human than a mail-in titled “We’d Like To Hear From You!”
In an age where we can connect instantly and the consequences of our actions are just as imminent, our challenge is to develop new ways of connecting with our customers and fulfilling their needs. Among those exploring this new online landscape, you can be certain the girls will be there.
Grab-bag contents included a packet of SPF30 sunscreen, post-its, and numerous pens. See you all next year!