Power Schmooze

[snousle]

Now that I have a respectable Web presence, the time has come for some face to face marketing efforts. Along those lines, John and I went out to the coast last night for one of the winemaker's dinners at the Mendocino Hotel. Navarro Vineyards was presenting their wines with a seven course Alsatian menu tailored to match them. At $75 per person all inclusive, it was a pretty good deal for what they dished up.

The chef was an interesting guy. He was COVERED in tattoos, from his chin to his knuckles, and although he admitted that he knew nothing about Alsatian cuisine, he studied up on it a good bit, and IMHO he did a bang-up job of it. I was particularly interested in his "smoked sand dab schnitzel", which he made by smoking the breadcrumbs rather than the fish itself. Very clever.

Anyway, we met the hotel owner right away, and fate landed us at a table right next to the winemaker himself, so I got my business cards into all the right pockets. I hope it leads to some further contact. This marketing strategy is SO grueling, I'm not sure how long we can keep it up! LOL.

[BTW, I'm a little angsty on the communications front again, because a test message I sent to my own address from the web page bounced with a strange error:

'tony@mosscamp.com' on 2/21/2009 11:41 AM
553 sorry, relaying denied from your location [66.81.65.158] (#5.7.1)

I couldn't make it happen again, though. What gives? It's hosted through GoDaddy and has never done this before. I sure don't want that happening to prospective clients!]

Comments

[bigredpaul.livejournal.com]

This marketing strategy is SO grueling, I'm not sure how long we can keep it up! LOL.

This is the nature of being self-employed. Until your calendar is booked with as much work as you want, your number one job is marketing your business. And that means talking about your business to folks.

[dhpbear.livejournal.com]

I believe Tony was being sarcastic - It must be absolutely grueling to Schmooze With Guys With Tattoos :)

[sinnabor.livejournal.com]

The "relaying denied" message is prolly an attempt at spam-prevention. Could be because there was a DNS lookup failure so the originating machine couldn't be checked against spam white/blacklists.

I don't really know what the setup is, so it's hard for me to know what to suggest. If you were talking about an end-user email program, the usual solution is to switch to authenticated SMTP, so the mail server has reason to trust you.

[ednixon.livejournal.com]

Wow. Mosscamp.com Very nice. Pretty green "mossy" colors.
Woofy professional otter photo too.

[ednixon.livejournal.com]

If you're still having that email bounce problem, get in touch with me, I'm sure my sysadmin for http://ednixon.com - Joe, can fix it trivially. He's in the Fremont area. I'm ednixon at yahoo.com

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Heh. I can't quite believe that fine dining could be justified as part of a business strategy. It still seems a little too good to be true. But it does seem like a necessary burden. ;-)

[zbear20.livejournal.com]

Red Wine and Cherry Braised Bacon? I think my shorts got a little wet reading that...but that's a good thing.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

That error sometimes happens because the system doesn't think it's the home of your domain for some reason. Sometimes that's just as simple as fixing some DNS. Sometimes it's a matter of adjusting config files.