Growing My Social Capital

1) Domain Expert:

• I made contact with Irmarie. She runs an online tourism website for Orlando and relies mainly on sponsored advertisements. 
• The person fulfills the domain expert "slot" because Irmarie's website is focused on tourism just like mine will be. She is also an expert on building and designing websites for tourism purposes.
• I contacted Irmarie through my grandparents. My grandparents used to own a travel agency that focused on Orlando and was therefore able to obtain the contact information through them. I had already known about the website from previous meetings.
• The exchange I had with Irmarie was actually through a meeting that occurred at my grandparents house. I mainly talked with her about advertising and the website design itself. She told how to show that which attractions were sponsored and which ones were not. I could also use her existing database to supply info on attractions for my website.
• Including Irmarie in my network could allow me to partner with her website in order to obtain recent information about Orlando attractions that has already been researched and created. This could also be good advertising for Irmarie's website.

2) Market Expert:

• The second person that I talked to is named Paula. She has worked in hotel and attraction sales for over twenty years.
• Paula fulfills the market expert "slot" because she has dealt with tourism sales for over twenty years. She has seen Orlando grow over time and she knows the ideal customers for different types of sales.
• My dad works in a local hotel and Paula works in their sales department.
• I met with Paula inside a local hotel restaurant. We talked about how I would sell the tickets online with bundles, sales, and an added convenience fee. She said to make sure that my customer's knew about the added fee from the beginning so that there were no surprises last minute. This website could possibly bring Paula more sales.
• With Paula in my network, I could have access to knowledge about sales from the past twenty years and how to be successful in sales based on tourism. With her help, the website could also bring more traffic through Paula's sales department.

3) Supplier:

• This third person was named Tony. He works in sales out of the biggest theme parks in Orlando. 
• This person fulfills the supplier position because he is responsible for the distribution of tickets to the theme park. 
• I found the person internally at the theme park I work for. I emailed him and we continued the conversation online.
• Our exchange was over email. Tony explained to me how they use online ticket sales for their own company and how I can use their system to sell tickets. The return expectation would be to increase their sales through this website.
• Including this person in my network will allow me to easily obtain tickets for the website and could also lead to the implementation of mobile online tickets for the biggest theme park in Orlando.

Reflect:

This experience taught me that for future networking I should target exactly who I need to reach success. Finding people who are experts in little portions of my needs could be better than finding people who are just like me. This differed from other networking events because I was looking for resources for my venture instead of just for myself.