Leeds Business Week Day 2 – Tuesday 14th October 2014

14 October, 2014

Today was the second day of Leeds Business Week and my first day of attending the event.

The first seminar of the day was ‘Think Like A Search Engine’, run by Northern Lights PR, hosted by Victoria Tomlinson and held at Northern Ballet.

One of the first things I noticed about the seminar was the amount of new faces – it just shows that The Yorkshire Mafia are continually engaging with new audiences which is great. Victoria’s seminar was all about using social media for business, the power of blogging but most importantly how to think like a search engine when using social media. The seminar was great and the key issues highlighted created many interesting talking points.

I then attended the very first ‘Leeds Business Lunch’, which was held at Bibis Italianissimo restaurant in Leeds and hosted by The Yorkshire Mafia. The Yorkshire Mafia asked me to supply a Twitter wall for the lunch, the idea being that people’s live tweets would be shown on the wall and left to continually scroll in the background, allowing people to tweet their thoughts or photos that they had taken during the lunch. It was a great success and brilliant to see so many people get involved. The food at Bibis was fantastic and to top it off we were treated to several guest speakers over the duration of the lunch.

Larry Gould, CEO of The Big Word, gave the first talk. Larry spoke about how businesses should not forget about being international and should remember to translate content for international audiences. It was an extremely interesting talk that highlighted the many different opportunities for businesses.

Then, Andrew Cope from FMG spoke about what the north has to offer. He talked about how we, as businesses in Leeds, perhaps need to work with Manchester. The main reason for this being because Manchester is ultimately seen as one of the capitals of the north. He also stated that northern business’ need to widen their horizons by thinking about and supporting the environment.

The final talk was given by Helen Beachell from Simon On The Streets. Helen very simply wanted to get across to people the extremely important message – don’t look the other way at people on the street. She highlighted that giving money is one thing but actually just giving your time, acknowledging someone on the street and listening to what they have got to say can make a huge difference. The talk was extremely thought provoking, packed with emotion and provided everyone with food for thought.

As always it was great to spot so many people at ‘Leeds Business Lunch’. Here are just some of the people that I spotted:

• Nicola Kaye
• David Israel
• Caron Munro
• Simon Palmer
• Phil Pond
• Becky Black
• Becky Gorman
• Lindsey Davies

All in all it was an excellent day and a great start to Leeds Business Week for me. As always, it was great to see people I knew but really exciting to see so many new faces. I am really looking forward to tomorrow, when I will be hosting a seminar – ‘Get A Competitive Edge With LinkedIn’, but I am also looking forward to attending lots of other seminars.

If you are attending any events this week, or have attended anything that you think was particularly brilliant, then as always I would love to hear from you.