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“Building your presence” in your industry is crucial, edUcon speaker Sherron Washington said Monday, in a time when more workers are moving to remote offices. (Whatever Media Group)
Sherron Washington reprised her signature “edutainment” style at PCMA edUcon 2024, engaging audiences as she did during Business Events Industry Week (BEIW) and at PCMA Convening Leaders 2024 and drawing again on her experience as a marketing and communications expert and professor — and as someone who has first-hand experience in the events business. Washington has been involved in the events industry since the beginning of her career. When she started her business, The P3 Solution, a Washington, D.C.–based, full-service marcomm firm, event planning was part of her role.
“I was marketing director for a few nonprofits, and we would organize conferences. And so I had experience in event planning before I started speaking at industry events,” she told Convene in an interview several weeks before edUcon. “I loved it then, and I love it now. The only part I didn’t love was registration, but I don’t think anyone loves registration,” she joked.
Washington, who is a professor at Trinity University and Stevenson University, showered audiences with that humor and expertise during two sessions on Monday, June 24: “It Levels to This: Elevating Your Brand to Advance Your Impact” and “Remote But Not Forgotten: Self-Promotion Strategies That Won’t Turn off Supervisors.” One connection she made between the edUcon sessions and her previous presentations at PCMA events is her edutainment style: “I bring the energy and the activities to make you think,” she said. But unlike her Convening Leaders session on navigating difficult conversations, Washington’s edUcon sessions required her to put on her “marketing and branding hat and talk more about building your presence in the industry,” she said. This is crucial, she said, in a time when more workers are moving to remote offices.
“People are isolating themselves. They’re not being seen, they’re not being promoted. Some people complain about being remote workers because they’re given more work, right?” Washington told Convene. “I don’t think remote workers are allowing themselves to be seen and heard because it’s a little more challenging when you’re not in person. It becomes almost like, ‘Hey, check me out!’ It’s a lot more of the person needing to be more engaging than they would be in person, because they don’t have that presence.” Instead of seeing that as a downside, Washington finds this shift in the workplace to be an opportunity to find new, creative ways to “build presences when not physically present,” she said.
Washington said the self-promotional strategies she shared at both her sessions can and should be put into practice immediately — not when attendees get back to work, but while they were still in Detroit. “They can definitely be implemented at edUcon — understanding how to elevate your brand and being more cognizant of how you are actually conveying your brand,” she said. “We have these characteristics that we believe we’re conveying in the world, but I’m putting that into practice — we’re doing activities [to make sure] we’re actually executing on the qualities we want to show people.”
Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene.