Meet & Greet and Promotional Material & Social Networking Swap

This is a brand new group! Hopefully we have a few members now, and it always makes things feel a little more at home when we get some faces to those names and avitars!

This first meetup, I'd like to be very casual, it's just to meet each other, and learn more about our current work and our art or craft of choice. Nosh a bit and talk about where we'd like to go and what we should do next.

We'll also start a Promo-Swap: bring your business cards, flyers, coupon cards or whatever else you've made, and we'll agree to include your paper tidbit along with our orders. Of course you must be willing to do the same for your other group members!

It works like this: Cool Joe gives me some of his promotional cards (coupon or discount offers work well for this!) and I slip one in along with my material when I fill orders for my products. I always write a note to my buyers when I send off my goods, so I'd just add a line that says something like "you might be interested in checking out this offer from Cool Joe, another independent local artist who specializes in (whatever Cool Joe does)."

Participation is of course, voluntary, but it's a great way to gain exposure to other potential customers who we know are down with buying from indie-artisans and artists. Cool Joe might do awesome metal sculptures, and I do jewelry. Obviously you don't need to feel like you need to make a Swap Agreement with someone who is kind of a competitor, but if you DO agree to Swap, just be a gem and follow through with it. The whole "you scratch my back and so will I thing" is just not cool!

And if you don't have any of this print eye candy to go along with your business, you can see what the buzz is about and get some tips on design and finding cheap printing.

Plus if attendees get me their Facebook pages and Twitter names, and the like, I'll send links via email and have a few print copies handy. Then we can all go to town "liking" and "following" and whatnot..showing some social networking love to help our numbers. If you haven't launched your business social networking pages yet, get some ideas and feedback from social mavens!