2011 Officially Kicked-off

As usual I’m a few days late blogging about LBM and as usual I’m struggling to start without gushing too much about how good a night it was, particularly challenging this time around given I was one of the speakers. Oh what the hell, I’m just going to say it, I thought this was a great LBM.

Nice to get the year started with such a bang and probably the busiest LBM to date – we had somewhere in the region of 120 bloggers turning up.

Obviously it was good to have our friends at Dell onboard. Nice to hear from Kerry (@kerryatdell) about the Trade Secrets campaign which you can check out on facebook soon. Of course the very generous bar tab helped us ease back into the year, but possibly the biggest crowd puller was the Dell Vostro laptop competition. We had over 40 entries to the competition and in the end two winners, with Andreas Kambanis from London Cyclist picking up the Vostro laptop and Tom Phillips a snazzy looking new mouse. You can read their entries here.

There were plenty of other great entries and we had a shortlist to choose from, including those where there was a genuinely good trade secret, or those that simply made us laugh…

Andy Roberts I wanted to make a good first impression so I tried painting my Dell laptop white, using a jumbo pot of tipex. It didn’t work and now I realise this was unnecessary. MACs aren’t the only cool computers any more.

IanVisits ..the more useful tip is to take a notepad with an interesting cover as it can be a good way to break the ice and build relations with people about shared interests.

Alex Guest speak clearly, “Beardy dear, yo Delhi pepper” = “Get it here! Your daily paper!”

Paul Wilkinson How NOT to make a good impression

Trust me, I speak from experience…. Sometimes everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. This all happened to me in one pitch to a new client last year:

1. Do not break your leg. Crutches are never a great look for a PR consultant, and you can get hot and sticky very quickly….

Stuart Waterman Whenever I meet a new person, I hand them a crisp ten pound note. It *must* be crisp – once I made the mistake of giving a new contact a crumpled note, and, while he still accepted the cash, I could tell he hated me for it. It was in the flare of his nostrils.

To those on the shortlist, we doff our caps and say well done, maybe next time you’ll be picking up the silverware (or in this case hardware).

I hope you all enjoyed my talk too. It was the first time I’ve done much more than introduce our speakers and welcome you all along to an LBM. You can see my prezi presentation below which has my 10 lessons and tips from the past four years of blogging. Just in case you’re curious and haven’t asked me yet, I blog about marketing and the London Bloggers Meetup events, but in the past I’ve also blogged about great places to eat in London for under a fiver, being a tourist in London and I have been the editor of the blog for lastminute.com.

There were too many people to name check this time around I’m afraid, but you can see a handful of snapshots from Peter Marshall here if you want to get an idea of who was there. Usual apologies to peeps I wasn’t able to speak to on the night, I seem to remember getting interrupted in mid conversation with many of you, most notably with Mex!

See you all again in around a month’s time.

Making a Great First Impression with Dell

It’s once again competition time and we have a fantastic prize for January’s London Bloggers Meetup provided by the good folks at Dell. What’s Dell got to do with making a great first impression I hear you ask?

Well, let me tell you.

Dell believes that for smallish businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs, making the right first impression is critical. Not only that, but the laptop you carry says as much about you as the clothes you wear.

Sure, laptops may only be a small part of what makes a good impression, but I have to agree with Dell here, the details count. I can tell you with confidence that I never carry my work laptop to meetings, because for some reason the IT department has seen fit to furnish me with what resembles a concrete slab, rather than a laptop. Oh how I long for something actually portable.

With that in mind and to promote the launch of their upcoming Facebook business community page, Dell is looking to bloggers and businesses to share as many “trade secrets” as possible about how to make that crucial first impression. The incentive, they are giving away one of their new ultraportable and surprisingly powerful laptops. Check out a review here.

If you want to be in with a chance to walk away from the next LBM with one of these laptops (valued somewhere in the £850 range), help Dell get talking about how to make a great first impression. Simply submit your “Top trade secret” in the comments below and turn up next Tuesday to see if you won!

We’ll be picking the winner ourselves and judging your submissions based on funniness and usefulness (in equal measure).