(x-posted from CarlenLea.com )
Despite my outgoing personality and insane level on social media involvment, I’m not very good at the conference/cocktail party networking thing. I attribute this to my being an INTJ and a Virgo . The "I" of INTJ means I tend to be introverted, and not comfy making small talk with tons of strangers. The Virgo means that I like to control situations and have things neat and orderly (not my house, just my life).
Nutshell is I suck at just chatting up strangers unless I have some specific thing I wish to say to them.
Thank goodness for the "back-channel ." I’m at the ePharma Marketing Summit and if it weren’t for Twitter (and my colleague Croom), I wouldn’t have spoken to a soul. Twitter is the introduction to a whole bunch of new people and thanks to one smart person, Shwen , we had a "tweeple" lunch yesterday where many of us met in person. Social media and technology has opened up an entirely new avenue of conference and post-conference networking.
Here’s my approach:
- Twitter during the conference. always using the conference "tweme" code (trust me they all have them now, and they are usually pretty simple to figure out). I do it almost as a way of taking notes on what is being said more than commenting and giving my opinions.
- Start following interesting conference tweeple , be sure to "@" them when they say something interesting and "retweet" good posts by other people. Be sure to look for the official conference Twitter person . There’s probably one there.
- Ask at least a couple of public questions during QA sessions, if you can come up with anything good. It gives other people a reason to come and talk to you! Do start with your name. I’m terrible about remembering that part. Today I would have been the "woman in lavender."
- Organize tweeple meals or at least attend them. You can just listen and nod attentively, if nothing else.
- When you do talk to people in person don’t just take the business card and file it away. That night, the next morning — hit LinkedIn.com ! Send them a network invite( mention that you just met them at the conference, refer to your conversation to jog their memory).
My boss insists that I at least talk to a couple of people at every conference and convince at least one person that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to social media, so I’ll get invited to participate on panels at future conferences. I guess you could call the whole approach "influencer networking." Often conference back-channels can be thoroughly overwhelming and distracting, thank goodness for the back-channel at ePharma or I’d never speak to anyone!
[tags]networking, social networking, conferences, back channel, twitter, linkedin[/tags]
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