Honors 212 Event: Reaching Out

For those tuning in to this blog without further introduction, it will be useful to know that I have been in a "Civilization" class at university for the last four months. It has been a fun and challenging course culminating in the production of one eBook and one TEDx-style event. Part of the event production was a sort of marketing blitz in which we were to invite friends and interested folk to either attend in person or view it over the web.

I'll be brutally honest. My efforts to invite my friends to the event were...lackluster. I don't think I hit the "quota" of 10 personal invites by a fair margin. This was due to me not being sold on it; I wasn't excited by the beta versions, so I found myself nearly unable to talk it up to anyone.

The silver lining is that I can more closely examine my efforts this way!

The people I invited fall into four categories:

1. Apt. 21
   This refers to a set of amazing friends I have. They are often very supportive of things I do, so I invited one of them. Turns out the LDS Institute here was having some sort of really cool speaker that had already taken precedence before I got around to inviting them. (That and extensive fatigue from working.)
   
   
2. Wilson&EEs
   Two of my friends in electrical engineering got an invitation right after class a day or two before the event. Turns out one was actually fairly interested, but both were planning to put many much late hours into a final homework sprint that night.
3. Roommates
   I invited a couple of my roommates, but anything I am in is likely either a) over their head or b) not as interesting as their normal activities. Such is the life of the awkward nerd.
   
4. Google+ peeps
   This was, by far, the most itneresting group I attempted to interact with. One of our tasks during the semester had been to attempt to find people interested in our selected/assigned topic. Most of my work in this direction was on Google+, and I wound up finding a number of interesting characters. Tim O'Reilly was easy to bump into, but I also added a couple of university students as well as Ibrahim Elbadawi, a strategist and eGovernment specialist for the United Arab Emirates. (Several avenues of social exploration -- including social bookmark sites and asking for referrals -- were stones left unturned, so this is no doubt a very small sampling.) Inviting them to the webcast was, tragically, a 6:59-PM-literally last-minute step.

Finding people is great; however, my difficulty was in contacting and inviting them. For one, I'm shy, especially in social settings I'm not familiar with. This is, admittedly, a personal shortcoming and not a good reason. (We call such statements "excuses" and they generally stink. ;) Star power also had a factor--inviting someone as famous as Tim O'Reilly to my class's little presentation seemed a little silly. I also failed to realize that our event would be a webcast too; this was also pretty much all my fault.


Still, all of these could have been overcome had I been sold on my product. The Google+ post that should have gone out inviting these people to contribute was typed, reauthored, and eventually abandoned whey I wasn't convinced by my own call to action. Why wasn't I? You guessed it! I blame me. Perhaps the upcoming class experience reflective blog post will reveal the details. :)