A huge conference room filled with hundreds of your industry colleagues, some of which you know but most of which you don’t.
For some reason everyone wears name tags, as if we aren’t able to introduce ourselves.
The subtle, fleeting glance downwards by others at your name tag. The two second judgement call of, ‘is this someone worth spending my time with’.
Small talk, maybe about the venue or superficially about the markets, then an awkward close of “would you like to swap business cards?”. A card which you will either bin or put into a 1980’s business card folder, never to be opened again. In this weird, black mirror-type environment, your job is to try and meet new people and forge long-term career relationships.
Traditionally, this is ‘networking’.
It’s usually awkward, transactional and largely pointless. A weird speed-dating like event where status is king. Ironically, the people who could actually help your career won’t be there, or they will give a keynote then leave immediately.
So how do you network in the 2020s?
The simple answer is: create content and publish it online.
Information workers spend average of 6.5 hours a day in front of a screen. A staggering fact.
In that way, we’re already living in a metaverse, just a very Outlook & Word-based analogue version of it. When we’re not emailing, we’re on social platforms.
300 million people log on to Linkedin every day, Twitter has 220 million active daily users.
Now that we know 80% of your industry colleagues time is spent online, for business and personal, surely from a probability point of view it makes sense to meet them where they are.
Aside from all the awkwardness, the real area where in person networking falls down: it isn’t scalable.
Spend 3 hours at an in person networking event and you could meet 10 new people. Use that same 3 hours to create, publish and distribute content to your direct network and you’ll reach an absolute minimum of 100 people.
Going on my limited personal experience, once you start creating or publishing online the entire act of networking becomes much less of a burden.
An afterthought, even.
I’m a very small example of online publishing. 2,000-ish followers on Linkedin is a modest audience size by anyone’s standards. Yet two years after creating a small finance podcast that is distributed online, the before and after is tangible.
Publishing online creates an continual stream of inbound inquiries, new connections, new followers, messages, emails, requests to be part of your content, even job offers!
More importantly, creating a network online is scalable. Ed Sheeran doesn’t rock up every time someone wants to hear one of his songs. He puts himself on a platform which allows people to listen anytime, anywhere.
Online content works for you when you’re asleep. That includes creating podcasts, short videos, posts like this one. Basically anything that is created by you that lives on the internet.
Back to our question of how to network in the 2020s…
If the choice is to go back to 300-person conferences where you cold introduce yourself to people you don’t know, and probably won’t know afterwards. Or to create and publish online reaching tens of thousands of people who are interested in what you are doing – I know which camp I’m in.
Of course we need to meet in person. But for efficient networking at scale, go online.
And throw away that name tag.