Grant Crowell (Gerks at Work)

Review of Northbrook Chamberof Commerce

OLD FASHIONED, OUT-OF-TOUCH, AND EVENTUALLY OBSOLE...

OLD FASHIONED, OUT-OF-TOUCH, AND EVENTUALLY OBSOLETE

I was a member here for one year in 2010, and decided not to renew my membership. They have no sense of being a business community, and instead are just about traditional sales and cocktail party networking at brick-and-mortar businesses. Many of the members are dismissive, and even outright hostile, to online social networking and new media, instead relying on doing annoying mailings and automatically subscribing you to their email lists. The Facebook page is just a sales tool and does nothing engaging with members, along with it's LinkedIn Page (which isn't even run by the Chamber, but they use it to promote themselves to attract new members.) They're entirely built around signing up members and selling advertising to those members, and did nothing for me in terms of attracting new business. The Chamber President is willfully ignorant about social media, online video, and anything that isn't beyond doing print newsletters or mixers at member buildings.

Most members in the Chamber are really either self-centered or apathetic. They're not about sharing, only selling. Numerous times I had people come up to me at events and say they really wanted to do business with me, when all they wanted was to get me on their mailing lists and sell me stuff, without even caring who I was or what I did. They operate with a very old-fashioned mentality of traditional marketing, which today is considered to be both highly annoying and ineffective. Really, how bad do you think it must be that out of their declared 700+ members, not a single one of them bothers to give even their own Chamber a public review, like I have here???

Unless you're a very old-fashioned person with a chiefly brick-and-mortar business that does everything around one-way advertising and physical products or services that are location based, I would advise you to steer clear of signing up with this Chamber. Even if your goal is to hire some local businesses, you can easily get better reviews of businesses online than at a local Chamber of Commerce.