In this hyper-connected age, it’s easy to think that just as all human wisdom and knowledge is available on the Internet, you can use today’s social networking Web sites to meet everyone worth meeting. In fact, both beliefs are wrong.
Just as there’s a “deep Web” orders of magnitude larger than the visible Web, many valuable human connections exist only in the flesh with no online presence. They’re reachable only via the 1930s speakeasy discipline, figuratively knocking and saying, “Joe sent me.”
Three such groups are among my most important connections, providing intellectual sustenance, professional networking connections far more valuable than LinkedIn and its ilk, and clients and expert sources for my writing.
The first is a monthly group focused on organizational leadership. Fourteen years old, it’s grown by word of mouth from a dozen attendees to a mailing list of 800 with 75 or so attendees at meetings. It runs on less than a shoestring, offers crisp dawn meetings, and assembles an impressive intellectual cadre. Folks I’ve brought in are as grateful to me as I am to my sponsor.
Another is an even less formal group of freelance professionals held together by a “den mother” who hosts brunch meetings and runs a members-only mailing list. While gatherings are intimate and friendly, the quality of information exchange is superb, as are the list’s questions/answers.
The third group, a bit more formal, involves for-fee meetings run by a local technology networking doyenne. Panel discussions are always lively and informative and I’ve first met major clients at these events.
These groups, among my few monthly “must do” events, came to me by happenstance. But you can cultivate such serendipity: ask colleagues, clients, and mentors which groups they find most rewarding. They may have assumed that you’re aware of their favorite hangouts. You can walk through doors you didn’t know existed and which you’d never have found online, finding kindred spirits for rewarding associations.
2 Comments
I’m glad to see that someone else – especially a colleague as valuable as Gabe Goldberg – appreciates the value of meeting and getting to know colleagues in person. All these social networking sites have their roles to play, and some of them can be quite useful, but they are proliferating at a rate that I think makes them less and less so, especially for business reasons.
Part of the problem is participants who think it’s worthwhile to have hundreds, even thousands, of connections – most of which are with people who have never met; never worked together; never had the chance to assess each other’s personalities, work ethics or characters. Connecting at such a level goes against the suggested guidelines of most such networks, but people do it anyhow.
As many colleagues know, I am networking incarnate, but I have serious reservations about the way the concept of networking is morphing on the Web. I’m using Internet connections all the time; I just try to make them ones that mean something. And, like Gabe, I most value the ones that have face-to-face, in-person levels of interaction.
Ruth T-C, Freelance Writer/Editor
Ruth@writerruth.com
Outstanding article, Gabe. I think that, with the focus on the online world these days, it’s easy to forget how powerful personal, in-person connections are. You’ve provided an excellent reminder.