Eat at Your Own Pace ...

Being involved in many committees has given me the opportunity to attend and organize many events. One topic that often arises is third party follow up by the host venue. If you attend an event for "XYZ Corporation", held at "ABC Restaurant", does ABC Restaurant have the right to contact you?
Let’s assume this is the situation; the owner of "ABC Restaurant" is contacting you via email one week after "XYZ Corporation’s" event to let you know about a special promotion they are having.
The problem:
In today’s age of "information overload", people receive and accept information differently, especially via email. For example, I have 4 email addresses: my work email, my personal email, my collaboration email (Gmail for Google Tools) and my spam and/or professional personal email. This definitely makes getting a message across very difficult. To make things worse, for all of these emails ... if I don’t recognize the name of the sender ... I usually delete it right away!
Therefore, how can "ABC Restaurant" make it through the filter?
Here is my best advice: people like to get relevant information, but they also like to control how they process that information.
Consider this - If you sat down to a table to eat dinner, would you prefer to:

1. Have food forced down your throat?
2. Have a full plate of food in front of you and get to eat at your own pace?

Clearly most people would choose option 2 so you as a business owner must find a way to get the information (the full plate of food) in front of people but let them decide when and how much they want to "eat".
Just as important as the message is the messenger!
To really have impact, try having "XYZ Corporation" (the original event organizer) deliver your message. The message will meet your targets through a trusted source, which will more likely get reviewed and considered. Most people will review information from a friend, as opposed to a stranger that they have only had one contact with.
The moral of this story:
If you are a host venue trying to get your message across to event attendees, make sure you use proper follow up etiquette. You wouldn’t want people to choke on your information!