I presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online for the second time, this time at the American Translators Association (ATA) ATA 46th Annual Conference in Seattle on Saturday. The presentation was well attended and well received. Among the members of audience where my friends, Beatriz Bonnet, president of Syntes Language Group in Denver and Christine Egwuonwu, senior project manager of Commgap in Salt Lake City. I also met Christine’s husband for the first time.

Two members of the audience who came to the front of the room to introduce themselves after my presentation really stood out: Sandra Alboum, owner of Alboum & Associates in Arlington and Natalia Jimenez, managing director of Eurologos in San Jose. Both of them noted my need for Italian-English and Italian-Spanish translators by looking closely at the screen grabs of my social networking software (SNS) profiles during the presentation and each of them came forward to recommend one. They’re either naturals at networking or quick studies!

Another member of the audience, Virginia Anderson of Canvas Dreams in Beaverton, Oregon, pointed out, during the customer relationship management (CRM) portion of the presentation, that her husband, David Anderson, had built ContacTracker, hosted CRM solution.

After the presentation, I had the pleasure of dining with ATA Translation Company Division (TCD) assistant administrator, Ellen Boyar, translation manager of Thomson Scientific in Philadelphia, past ATA TCD administrator Linda Gauthier, COO of BG Communications International in Montreal and Greg Churilov, president of Effective Translations in Buenos Aires. We talked about money, politics, religion and sex. We are now closer than ever. Remember, networking is about building relationships and building relationships is personal.

To top off a great networking weekend, on my way home, I met up with the same Southwest Airlines flight attendant I first met on my trip home from the ATA TCD 6th Annual Conference in Philadelphia where, coincidentally, I first presented Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online last April. I recognized her first and reintroduced myself. She remembered me, my book, Vacation Spanish, and the flight we were on when we first met.

On my flight to Seattle I had met a linguist, author and speaker, Don Richardson (who was also traveling to Seattle to speak,) who, as a Christian missionary in far flung places across the globe, has documented types of Christ woven into the languages and cultures of the peoples among whom he has lived and worked and has written a number of books on the subject. Don told me a couple of compelling stories that aroused my curiosity. I now look forward to reading one or more of his books. I hope to stay in touch with him and his lovely wife, Carol, who was traveling with him to give a solo singing performance in Seattle.

For those of you who missed my presentation, and for those of you who would like to review it, I’m sorry I didn’t consent to have it recorded on the DVD the ATA made of this year’s conference presentations. I promise I’ll do it next time. In the meantime, you can download Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online.ppt or read Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online, the first in a series of articles on the subject published in the ATA TCD newsletter (the second one is due out later this month.) I also recommend reading CustomerCentric Selling by Michael T. Bosworth, author of Solution Selling, and The Virtual Handshake by my good friend, online business networking guru, Scott Allen, and Never Eat Alone by master networker Keith Ferrazzi. See also: Blogger, Bloglines, Ecademy, FreeCRM.com, Hoovers, LinkedIn, openBC, Plaxo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, TypePad and WordPress.