“la parole exportée”

• @zjjtrans Wow. That’s a strong statement! #
• @zjjtrans I’m working this weekend. Had some rest yesterday. #
• Currently Browsing: http://tinyurl.com/6hc5fb Huit produits astucieux pour vous faciliter les vacances #
• Seems like some young people are already practicing with July 14th crackers at the back of my yard. #
• @LindaZimmer Don’t think that these guys have ANY idea of what July 4 is #
• @matthewbennett What happened to your website? #
• Blog Update My Diigo http://tinyurl.com/5arwcc #
• @matthewbennett I was looking for your blog and went to the wrong address, that’s why. #
• @matthewbennett I haven’t seen Doctorlingua. #
• @matthewbennett You should be careful not to mix things, if they are two separate lines of business for you. It could get confusing. #
• TweetDeck is quite neat. I like the dark background. Very soothing yet professional-looking. #

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• Happy 4th of July to my American friends. Enjoy the parties and the fireworks! #

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Thanks to Ann Rusnak, The Time Diva, a new kind of event was premiered on Twitter last night, Twitterville Business After Hours (hence the @tbah entries in my twitter feed below). Ann couldn’t have chosen a better name for it, it was really ‘after hours’ for me, as the event started at midnight. I dropped off at 1am, but I really wanted to take part in this new type of online event. The guests were from Australia, the USA and France, if I’m correct. What better way of demonstrating the power of the internet?

As if the time slot wasn’t hard enough for me, my computer decided to play up just as things were taking off, but after that small glitch, it was all business chat and passing Twips and Twitteritas. (I regularly forgot to pass them on, not that I was ‘consuming’ them either. :)) TBAH is, provided it’s used properly, a good way to promote your business and your services, in a relaxed way. Instead of simply pushing your tweets, inner thoughts and general actions into the ether, you are publicly talking to other people about your business. A more natural way of making yourself visible.

Ann is planning another such event next month. I have a few ideas about offering a more useful contribution, translation-wise, but I’ll have to discuss this with her first.

Whether or not you already have a Twitter account, would you like to participate in a future event?

When I started as a freelance translator many years ago, the only way you could approach the business world, and thus prospective clients, was by sending off masses of unsolicited mail that ended up in waste paper baskets if you were unlucky, or got a polite reply if you were lucky. I sent off hundreds of such letters, and I remember sticking hundreds of stamps on hundreds of envelopes. Alas, I didn’t receive hundreds of replies.

Fortunately, things change. They are changing fast, and part of the new business game has to do with making connections online.

To me –is it age? is it cultural?– this is not entirely satisfactory, because I like to meet people offline too. So it happens that after meeting a Facebook friend in person last month, and I had a genuine interest in meeting him, since I help him with the English version of his blog, I met an American LinkedIn connection today, and a connection of hers who is now a connection too.

To make it absolutely crystal-clear, I’m not expecting these friends to shower me with translations; this is networking, not client-chasing, but I believe that mixing with people from different horizons is one of the greatest things that has happened to me thanks to my professional choices. Being used to meeting new faces virtually throughout my working life, and working with different people all the time, I have no difficulty interacting. I have worked for clients from all levels of society and I am therefore quite open to social interaction.

photo credit: garybembridge

So we had our first International LinkedIn Paris Meeting, with a drink at Hotel Lutetia. Unfortunately a French LinkedIn connection could not attend. It was a real business meeting: we described our experiences (these ladies are in the travel industry), we exchanged business cards, we discussed the respective merits of websites, blogging platforms and social networks. We exchanged networking tips and sources of information…

Have you had a similar experience? If you have, would you like to share it with us?