BNI SuccessNet - July/August 2003 - BNI: More Than A Meeting

To experience an explosion of knowledge about word-of-mouth referral marketing, stick around. BNI members and staff are living the referral marketing experience every hour of every day in every corner of the world. Members and staff add to the base of knowledge about referral marketing throughout the world every day.

Five years ago, there were three BNI annual conferences in the world. Now, there are at least eight annual conferences on referral marketing, and all eight are sponsored by BNI. This increasing number of conferences is like a series of brainstorm sessions. New information, experiences and knowledge are shared among the thousands of participants, then recorded and then shared further a field.

Consider the following from the Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org): "More new information has been produced within the last three decades, than in the last five millennia. Over 9,000 periodicals are published in the United States each year, and almost 1,000 books are published daily around the world. In every 24-hour period approximately 20,000,000 words of technical information are being recorded. A reader capable of reading 1,000 words per minute would require 1.5 months, reading eight hours every day, to get through one day's technical output, and at the end of that period, he would have fallen 5.5 years behind in his reading!"

BNI's Global Boom
This "information explosion" also applies to our specialty of referral marketing. BNI staff published more than eight books and many articles in the past 12 years about referral marketing. The experiences of BNI members and staff are recorded and refined every day into effective result-driven programs. These programs are then shared at one or more of the growing number of BNI conferences held around the world where ultimately they show up in BNI chapters.

Canadian BNI members test ideas that were first developed in BNI U.K. A BNI program spawned in Toronto may show up in Chicago and then be shared with BNI Singapore where it is further refined and improved upon. The next iteration for the program may come alive in BNI Maryland or BNI Israel, and on it travels.

Turning Experience into Knowledge
Knowledge is often used to refer to a body of facts and principles that are accumulated by mankind in the course of time. We could say that knowledge is a familiarity with a subject, which is gained through empirical experience. BNI has lots of empirical experience with word-of-mouth marketing, and we are rapidly turning that experience into our knowledge base.

We gain new knowledge about our subject of referral marketing, through increasing familiarity with the many complex and intricate facts and principles of this marketing phenomenon.

Knowledge comes in three levels:

a. To know about at a superficial level
b. To know about at a deeper level
c. To know how ( according to Roger Clark)

BNI's experience and knowledge base on this specialized field marketing is probably the largest in the world. Our knowledge of referral marketing goes beyond a casual awareness. We know about this field at a much deeper level, where we can increase our own referrals. Most importantly, BNI knows how to make referral marketing come alive and grow for the members.

What's amazing is that we are at the beginning of our own information and knowledge explosion. BNI is hitting its own critical mass in terms of generating new knowledge from our growing experiences around the globe.

With more than 50,000 members and 500 professional staff adding to this base of knowledge every day, BNI has entered a knowledge explosion that will double in the next three to five years. If you want to experience the knowledge explosion, just stick around. Work the program and enjoy your harvest.