From the President’s Desk: Good Engagement

As business leaders, we spend much of our time analyzing and addressing challenges. It’s why we’re here: to do the work that’s hard. To build things. To fix problems. To find the way forward. It’s worthwhile as well, though, to step back and look at our teams’ successes. This provides not only perspective – a lot of things are going right – but also the opportunity to examine why they’re going right. Perhaps some of that magic can be applied elsewhere in our strategy and operations.

One thing that’s going all kinds of right with Chicagoland Chamber members is their engagement with one another, and with our team here at the Wrigley Building, whose job is to raise awareness of your businesses, your products, your initiatives, and to facilitate targeted connections.

Chamber networking events are consistently filling-up quickly. We know from recent interviews with members that’s for two reasons. Firstly, we’re partnering with members who provide the most spectacular venues. Summer examples include the brand new Home Plate Club at the Cubs’ Park at Wrigley, the terrace at Sixteen overlooking the river and Mag Mile, the sleek indoor/outdoor space at WeWork Kinzie, and the fine dining of Fleming’s Steakhouse. The other reason, and ultimately the most important one, is what happens in those settings. You’re meeting the people you’ve been wanting to meet; a B2B crowd that’s friendly, welcoming, and there to talk business, to see if you can help each other’s bottom lines. Our next networking event is a Business After Business on Wednesday, August 23^rd at the Union League Club. It will have an international spin to it through our partnership with the Chicago International Trade Commissioners’ Association (CITCA). You can register for it here.

The metrics show our digital content resonating as well. As you may have seen in our Year in Review, Chamber social media engagements were up 116-percent in FY 2017, while our followers on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook rose 10-percent, 13-percent, and 27-percent respectively. Our email-open rate hit 30-percent in June, and 28-percent in July. This is all huge because it’s all for you. The larger and more engaged the Chamber’s B2B audience is, the larger and more engaged your audience is for news and marketing content, brand positioning, and business development.

A Chamber motto of ours is Real Connections. Real Business Results. We’re proud to be living up to it, and we’ll keep getting better. Please reach out to me any time to tell me how you think we’re doing.

Sincerely,

Michael L. Reever, Esq.
Acting President & CEO
Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce