Josh Constine of TechCrunch reports,
Forbes is building a social networking app exclusively for these millennial leaders, which will launch at its 30 Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia on October 4. The goal is to stoke this community into somewhat of an alumni network that attracts more powerful youngsters to the Forbes empire. It will offer a directory of members, a feed where they can post social media stories or polls, and the option to message each other.
This ties in very loosely to something I have been thinking about, following a conversation with the UK’s Stephen Brien. That is, from a PSST perspective, what can be done to combat a recession? I talked about how World War II created new social ties among American servicemen, leading to businesses being formed by buddies who had met during the war. Stephen coined the expression “shaking the kaleidoscope” to describe doing something that might lead people to create new patterns of specialization and trade.
Experiments with new forms of social networking might be a way to shake the kaleidoscope. Is there a way to foster better connections between people in small-town Ohio and people in coastal cities? Between loud-mouthed sales people and quiet engineers?
When I started an Internet business in 1994, I kept in mind a documentary called “The Compleat Beatles,” in which early on the narrator says that “They were lucky, meeting the right people and playing the right clubs at critical moments in their careers.” This led me to try a lot of networking opportunities, hoping that I would meet the right people. Almost all of my efforts led nowhere, but two of them brought me my key partner and my key software engineer, without whom I would have had no chance. You could say that I shook the kaleidoscope a bunch of times, and a couple of times I got lucky.
Anyway, what I have in mind is not an app or a local happy hour. I am thinking in terms of in-person events that combine people from different backgrounds and different locations. Conferences sort of do that, except that people often have very similar backgrounds and many conference organizers put too much focus on speakers and not enough on creating opportunities for connection.
Suggestions welcome.
Shaking things up, trying to network, reaching out to people you don’t normally spend time with, none of these things is guaranteed to work every time. Persistence and patience plus vigorous reaching out will eventually result in ‘good luck’. It’s amazing what can fall into your lap if you position yourself under it….
Agree wholeheartedly. I met my wife, found a career and found a place to live through serendipity. Opening up new channels leads to unexpectedly good results. Unfortunately, I see far too many who stick with what they know and do not venture forth.
I am CEO of a small to mid-sized company and recently joined a Vistage group in my local community. The idea is to bring together a group of non-competing CEO’s who can talk confidentially and openly about their businesses and offer one another feedback. We meet once a month for a full day and the spend about half the day tacking a real-world problem that one of the CEO’s is dealing with. Maybe not the diversity that your are gesturing toward, but the diversity of businesses in this group is a plus. I am also in organizations specific to my trade (multifamily development and management) but the Vistage group is proving more helpful so far.
It seems this mixing used to be handled by the habit of the English to form clubs. The uniqueness was that the clubs were voluntary, did not define the individual, and often had friendly competition with like-minided clubs.
I believe this civic habit fell by the wayside due to the mobility and spreading out of the population as well as the attacks by activists for their sometimes unjustifiable exclusivity. We see this continue today where university Christian clubs are prohibited from limiting leadership positions to, well, actual professed Christians.
When I read Alan Macfarlane’s discussion below, I tried to imagine how such clubs could be formed virtually over social media. It just seems like the need structure hasn’t been found to be replicable…yet.
Alan Macfarlane describes the English habit of clubs here:
http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/08/invention-9/
Arnold,
Honest suggestion: if you arranged some sort of meetup for readers of this blog I think it’d be a huge success, and would probably replicate some of the qualities you talk about here.
I’d guess the turnout would be small (maybe a few dozen people) but we’d have enough in common to relate to one another and my intuition is that the professional backgrounds of the people here are sufficiently varied to give us all exposure to slices of life we normally don’t get access to in our day-to-day trek.
Take a look at meetup.com. it has thousands of groups and used by many many people to form and announce lots of varied groups.
I used the term of the word meetup generically, not as a specific reference to the site itself.
My basic point was that if Arnold wanted to arrange some sort of gathering of people who read this blog he could probably do it and I think it’d go well.
I wonder if a systematic form of business professional “speed dating” would show results? Typically the biggest barrier to networking is the time required. Frequently the venue is such that it can alienate or overshadow the networking goal (conferences, happy hours). My understanding is that speed dating is effective because you make only a very small time investment in each interaction, with almost no risk, but you greatly increase the odds of making a good connection because so many people are involved.
I can visualize a “speed networking” group that randomly creates sets of 10 participants that have not “dated” before, that are not in similar industries or professions, and who meet somewhere for an hour and talk one-on-one for five minutes each, ten times, with one minute between conversations. The venues and schedule would be varied to increase participation and variety, ideally allowing participants to continue chatting after the initial hour. (IE: Not just at bars, but outdoors at parks, boardrooms, classrooms, bike rides, etc.)
You said “not an app” but I can imagine that being able to see portraits of the ten people after the event to make notes or arrange a follow-up conversation would cut down on the information overload during the event itself.
I have this vague idea that the conversations would be most productive if they were kicked off with some hints associated with the person’s profile, perhaps fun questions suggested by previous matches who chose to keep in touch.
To me the only real value of a network like LinkedIn is the reasonable assurance that it’ll let me more easily keep in touch with people as the years pass. They might move, change jobs, phone numbers, etc., but if their profile is linked to a current e-mail address I have a good chance of reaching them. Having that kind of record of your “speed dates” a few months later when you see a reason to touch base might be powerful.
I could also imagine such events being very popular as side events to large conferences, sporting events, or for anyone traveling on business. During layovers at airport hubs that last more than an hour? This lends itself more to the kaleidoscope idea, adding a strong geographical element to the process.
Anyway… just some thoughts that came to mind.
sounds like something worth trying.