Think Digital – New Cardiff Business Event

Being a web company means your clients can be all over, from London to New Zealand, New York to South Africa. Sounds glam, but I think it’s easy to forget what’s on your doorstep – and there’s a great saying: ‘Don’t forget your roots, for they’ll always support you‘, which I think is a nice approach to working with local companies. When I started at Big Eye Deers, I was keen to meet up with local business people… having worked away in London for 10yrs I felt it was really important to find out who’s who and who does what in Cardiff, with us being based in Cardiff Bay. So I tried out a number of Networking events in Cardiff: Cardiff Ignite (really fun and met some lovely people including organisers Claire Scantlebury and Neil Cocker), BNI (for the hardcore 5am start referral-givers), Business for Breakfast (really early start again, oof!), Introbiz (I found this great for learning about other businesses, fast), Cardiff Connections (enjoyed the social media event at Soda bar), as well as attend The Welsh Business Show and a few other expo-type things with seminars and such.

One thing each of these events have in common is how well attended they are; there’s clearly a great scene of peeps in Cardiff utterly committed to putting themselves and their companies out there, as well as being up for seminars and workshops etc. And of course, there’s all the card swapping; Cardiffians are obsessed with card swapping! I guess we’re all desperate to ‘connect’ to ‘be seen’ to shout out our ‘USPs’ to basically market ourselves. Which is a good thing, and pretty essential these days. Anyhoo, I started daydreaming of an event that would focus more on the ‘learning’ side of digital things, but not be stuffy or take too much of people’s time… an event where you can have a glass of wine and a canapé, sure, but most importantly, an event which doesn’t  tell you how to upload a LinekdIn profile picture, but instead inspires, offers new info, transferable know-how that would give people an extra oOoMPH and motivation to maximise their online activities – to encourage people to think of putting a clear strategy in place, consider investment Vs ROI, work out what the hell your facebook is offering people, and question the performance of your website or PPC campaigns. Sometimes we all just need a reminder of the technologies out there, of the people and services around us, the prospects that can come with ideas, the benefits that can come from sharing information…

So without further ado Think Digital was born. My boss Steve at Big Eye Deers loved the idea of putting something on and so for the first one we set out to involve like-minded companies in Cardiff. We’re delighted to be working with Allan Blair Beaton who not only is a key speaker, but is also tweeting out to the masses (check out @TDCardiff) and secured the wonderful Park Plaza’s KuKu Club as a main sponsor of the event. We’re also thrilled to have Gareth of Liberty Marketing on board, as well as Elliot Reuben, an amazing strategist who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. All exciting stuff.

We’ve designed a website, mailer and twitter account for the whole shindig, please do have a gander and pop along if you find any of this appeals to you…

Ciao for now.
xJenni