There are few activities that scream -- or, hopefully, croon -- fun work environment more than after-hours karaoke. The Accounting Today team recently embarked on our own sonic pilgrimage to a Manhattan bar, and then supplemented the experience with another outing in Las Vegas during the 2013 AICPA Practitioners Symposium and Tech+ Conference and Association for Accounting Marketers Summit in early June.
That first Sunday night, fueled by networking reception cocktails and a false sense of confidence, we rounded up a game group of attendees across all the mega-conference's intersecting tracks and headed to a dive bar on the strip.
As the show continued, major trends throughout the marketing sessions had me reflecting on those first night's antics - namely authenticity, personality and differentiation. One need only look over our Best Firms to Work For list to find countless examples of firms providing fun events for employees. But something stops them short of sharing those with a wider audience.
During an inbound marketing panel, BBR Marketing president Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk said that she convinced a skeptical firm partner to include his love of scotch in an online bio. Within a 90-day period, five to six people reached out to meet over a glass. Another firm that she worked with wrote a "fun" blog post about the office dog that garnered greater Web traffic than their "serious" posts.
An attendee told a stunned audience that her firm, Francis & Co., displays its partners' personalities through Pinterest boards. Whether through social media or song choice ("War Pigs" for tech editor Seth, "Dance, Dance, Dance" for EIC Dan and "What I Got" for me), CPAs must communicate their authentic self.
All of the World Wide Web is your karaoke stage. Now #dance!
