Olina Qian

Just came back from my CINA event on ‘Utilizing Social Media to Market Your Business and Branding’. I was the event manager and host and I was so excited today.

This event is definity a big thing. Around 80 people showed up today. When I checked the registration list this morning, I saw more many people signed up over night, I felt amazing. The whole day I was busy on work, but thought about my hosting. I need to open the event by introducing CINA, and three great speakers: Adam, Irene and Yukai Chou.

I finished my work around 5:00pm, picked up Vicki and we car pooled to Fenwick together. Vicki is the president of CINA and we’ve been friends since we met. I felt one great thing to work with Vicki is that she is very generous. She gave me lots of opportunities to practice in all aspects without pressure. Even when I I am not doing great, she never judged me. She acted like a big sister, always supported me on my back. I felt lucky to meet her in my life.

We arrived in Fenwick around 5:45pm. After I set up the registration table, people starts to come. Today we had the best volunteers team. Jiafeng Zhu(CEO of Youapproach inc) is our head of Registration, along with Yulin Hua, Sophie Liu, Kelley Du and Sinyee Cheung. I explained to them how to use registration list, then Jiafeng took over the responsiblity to train the new volunteers and managed the front end.

Then I started to practice on my opening again. I usually don’t do so since it’s a great time to social and mingle with people. But today I really didn’t prepare enough. Thanks Amy and Marc’s help, they gave me lots of great tips and good suggestions in the last minutes. Marc is the founder of Ovient English, so he is a real pro about communication, I think I need to check out Ovient sometimes too.

Around 7:00pm, our event started. I started like this:

Good evening everyone. Welcome to CINA. I am Olina Qian, and I am your event manager and host today. Today is really a special day. July 1st. The first day of the 2nd half of the year. So please say hi to people seat around you, if you know them, you can thank them for their support for the past half year. If you don’t know them, it’s really a great day to know a new friend.

Then people started to laugh and talked to each other. I also said hi to Adam, Yu-kai and Irene. Then I wanted to continue. But people were still talking. I have no clue how to bring them back. I started to felt a little nevous. But I soon calm down. Then I started to introduce CINA:

First, let’s give a brief introduction about CINA: CINA was founded in 1992 and served as a platform to connect VCs and Entrepreneurs together. We provide leadership training and business training and our members are all business professional and Entrepreneurs who aspired to change the world.

Today’s agenda: We just did our Registration. Our workshop will start from 7pm to 8:30pm, then followed by a 30 minutes QA session. From 9pm to 9:30pm is our social networking time.

Now, it was the time to introduce our speakers. I said:

It’s our great honor to have three awesome speakers here. First is Adam Helweh, he is the CEO/founder of Secret Sushi. Secret Sushi is a company focused on providing creative, marketing, and branding services for businesses of all kinds. I met Adam in a Secret Sushi event he hosted.. I was impressed when he said all the event income will goes to the Charity. I really appreciate his spirit.Today Adam will give us a 30 minutes talk on how to use twitter to and how to get started using it for business.

Next speaker is Irene Koehler. Irene is founder/CEO for Almost Savvy. She is a branding expert. She showed me lots of good knowledge about how to use Linkedin! Today she is going to show us how to use LinkedIn to brand your business and professional career.

Then it comes to Yu-kai Chou, CEO/Founder of Future Delivery. The most recent project Yu-kai working on is viralogy, a social media rank that measures people’s influence on the internet. Today Yukai is going to give us a broad picture of social media, then a little bit about how blogging can build up your business/personal branding. Let’s welcome Yukai Chou.

The more I spoke, the more I felt I was little nervous today. But luckily that I am done! So I passed the microphone to Yu-kai. Yu-kai is very good at explaining things. So he made the presentation very informational and very interesting. I believe all the audiences are being attracted by him and learned a lot from him tonight.

Then Adam started to talk about Twitter. I really admire Adam’s public speaking skill. He looked so confident and so nature in front of people. I felt there are lots of things I can learn from him.

After Adam’s speech, Irene talked 30 minutes about Linkedin. It’s the first time I see Irene in person, but I really like her presentation style. She is really an expert in branding and she knows how to use Linkedin to buildup business and professional branding. I felt I like her a lot.

I think the audience like the topic. They asked a lots of good questions during the presentation. I was worried that if the presentation was too long, people might leave without ended. But turned out nobody left for the session. Even after speech, lots of people asked good questions still. We were plan to finish workshop around 9:00pm, we actually finished around 9:40pm, people seems still enjoy it.

After the Q&A session, I announced the upcoming event for CINA, and proudly introduced my volunteers team today. I am so happy that I have such a great team; they were all very dedicated and willing to help out. I love them.

After workshop, it’s our social networking time. People enjoyed the session and we stayed around 10:30pm before we go home. Thanks Michelle, Yulin, Elisa and a gentleman, they helped me to move all my stuff into my car before they left. They are the best.

What a great event it is, we got the best speaker, the best volunteer team and the best audience. I am so happy to have this opportunity to serve in this event and I am so glad to hear that people all find this event is very informational to them. Then I felt my time worth it.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Vicki who brought me to CINA, and created lots of opportunities here. Thanks Jiafeng, Yulin, Sophie, Stephanie, Kelley for the full support in the registration team. Special thanks goes to Yu-kai, Adam and Irene, three awesome speakers today. Without all of yours hard working, nothing can be happen. But together, we made this great event happening and we did bring knowledge to people today!