It seems that a lot of events I go to take place at the Syracuse Doubletree off Carrier Circle; so be it. This time it was an event called by Wendy Cobrda called Prime 4, which built upon the Prime 3 event I wrote about last October.

It seems I got one thing wrong slightly back then, though it’s not really my fault. This wasn’t only for people over 40; last time that’s all that showed up. This time there were a few people under 40 who came, and I think that’s a good thing because it takes a good mix of people to make something like this worthwhile.

About 25 people showed up, all members of a LinkedIn group called Linked Syracuse; if you’re on LinkedIn and work in the Syracuse or central New York area you should think about joining it because there’s almost 3,000 people who are members at this point, possibly more since I last looked last Monday. I’m not sure if this was the lowest turnout, but it still wasn’t all that bad, although it might have been better if we’d had our own space instead of crowding out a small group of people who were practicing Spanish for the week; oh well…

What did we do? Every person there had the opportunity to talk about themselves, which was pretty cool. You had as much or as little time as you wanted to take, but most people stayed under 5 minutes. Of course Wendy, who led the discussion, talked longer. 🙂 It was an interesting and eclectic group of people, and only one person didn’t say anything because she came with a co-worker.

Here’s the thing. This wasn’t a tip club and in a way it’s what a networking group should be trying to do. That is, it brought together a bunch of people in diverse businesses who not only got to tell you what they did but what kind of help you could possibly give them. We even found one person who might have a place for our next meeting, a beautiful location that, unfortunately for me, is so far on the other side of the city that I might have to take a train (I’m kidding).

After we all went around telling what we do we got down to the open networking, and it went easier because we had at least gotten a bit more familiar with each other, and a few people already had ideas on how they could help someone else. And the lady in yellow had asked people for hugs because she’s been going through some tough times, and I’m always willing to accommodate someone needing hugs. 😉

I’m not sure when the next event will be but I hope a lot more people come and are ready to share. Last time we kind of had an agenda that, in my mind, went astray. This time I felt really good about how things went, and even got to have 2 cookies from the Doubletree; it pays to know people.