Photo Credit: adria.richards

Here’s me and my client Velma McKenzie Orr as we were walking down Fifth ave in New York City after a great lunch at Aburiya Kinnosuke, a great Japanese restaurant.

I’ve learned something from these web 2.0 cloud computing companies — meet your customers and clients in person!

I subscribe to the Freshbooks newsletter and always saw they were having “customer dinners” around the country. I thought, “That’s sorta weird” because why do that when they could just send an email thanking their customers? Then, I saw Zendesk did this as well, having meetups with their customers. I put this out of my mind for a bit.

Even my own clients were lamenting, “Adria, we don’t ever see you anymore. You do everything remotely”. I didn’t see this as a bad thing and even got a web cam so I could do video Skype calls (This quickly led me into AskAdria.com).

Then I started going to blogging conferences and it all…made…sense.

Connecting with people in person is different than electronic contact. Now I’ve made it my mission to fly out and meet all of my clients in the next year!