Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Political partying

Last night, I went to a fund-raising event for a local politician who’s running for re-election this fall.  Being of the journalist persuasion, I’ve attended such things in the past only as a working reporter for a major daily, so finding myself there as a private citizen with my business cards in my pocket felt a little odd.

But not that odd, as it turns out – the crowd was made up pretty entirely of members of the arts community I’ve covered and known well for years and I quickly discovered that it’s fun to network with people I already know and like a lot, but who haven’t necessarily heard about my new business yet.

I’m capable of making myself converse with roomfuls of total strangers, but I don’t enjoy it much. Ok, that’s an understatement - generally speaking, I’d rather unstop toilets all day than walk up to circles of people I’ve never seen before and engage them in chitchat.

So while I realize that the point of networking is to expand the number of people who know me and my company, it sure was nice to walk into a party and realize that I was never going to be able to catch up with all the people I wanted to talk to before the evening ended. 

It’s also clear that politics offers a great way of connecting with the people likeliest to share the ideas and value the mission my business champions. I have to believe that supporting candidates and issues would be a good guerrilla-marketing strategy for any business that wants to be – or at least doesn’t mind being – associated with certain philosophies and positions.

So I had another V-8 moment in my ongoing self-education as an entrepreneur. Only one problem: Political support costs a lot more than a can of juice.