The Future of Awkward Networking
Did you ever happen to attend an early Tweet Up? Let’s use the Wayback Machine to travel back 16-ish years.
At the national professional association where I worked, we had a small but active Twitter following. As the annual conference approached, we saw an appetite among the Twitter community to meet each other IRL. I asked the event crew if we could informally borrow an empty room to hold a Tweet Up (an in-person gathering of Twitter users). I had no idea if it would work, so I planned to have a small test, spending a budget of exactly $ 0.
The Tweet Up wasn’t on the official program. I announced it on Twitter, and if I know myself, I announced it as a test. It probably read something like this, “Join us for our first ever Tweet Up in the ABC room on Tuesday at 2-3 PM. This event is a test, and we’re not sure how it will go, but we hope you like it!”
Not knowing what to expect, I showed up a little early and was relieved when 45-ish people showed up, too. I’m not sure who started it, but someone wrote their Twitter handle on their badge, so we all did. It was SO much fun matching Twitter handles that I had been conversing with online for the past year with the real person. What really stuck with me about that event is how quickly and effortlessly people who didn’t know each other started talking. I suspect some lasting friendships were made that day.
I must admit that knowing what I know now, I was a pretty poor party host. All I did was provide an empty room, announce the meet-up, and arrive early, yet there was such excited conversation that a few people told us it was one of the best events of the conference.
There were two reasons why that event worked so well. First, we enabled a group with a common interest to gather—all heavy Twitter users. These attendees were a small subsegment of the membership and conference registrants. Of the 3,000 attendees, 45-ish came to the Tweet Up. The event’s goal was to gather Twitter users, and the attendees could use that goal to find common ground quickly.
Second, meeting beforehand online translated to more effortless in-person conversations. “Oh, you are @HRGal?! I LOVE your Tweets!…”
In my research with 477 members, one result is crystal clear: people really don’t like receptions (unless they’ve been super active members of the association for a long, long time, in which case, they are there to see their friends or are super extra extroverted, in which case, they are there to be with people). But even members who are not long-time members or extremely extroverted want to network, so I’ve longed for more ways to match members by commonalities like organization demographics, interests, responsibilities, projects they are working on, etc.
Some associations have tried mentors and buddy systems with some pretty good results, but each has been a heavy lift on staff.
Perhaps we now have a way to conserve staff resources with the help of AI. In fact, we might be closer than we think because Jay Daughtry, Chief Communications Officer/Owner of the communications consultancy CQbd, recently asked ChatGPT to return a list of people in the association industry that he should get to know based on particular criteria and posted the results on LinkedIn.
His post sparked my imagination, not because the list was all that insightful (it pulled together a group of us who had contributed a LOT of content to the association industry), but because AI could be adapted for specific member matching within an association or even among event attendees.
Imagine this use case: attendees are asked a few “sorting questions” during registration, like “What kinds of projects are you working on now?” A week before the event, attendees are prompted to query the member matching bot for people who might know what they want to know. Once they have a few names, the bot gives them an easy way to connect before the event, perhaps providing an editable template email. Time is allocated at the event for matched members to meet up.
Perhaps with a bit of AI matching help, a few more lifelong friends will be made!?
Oh, in case you are interested in the outcome of our tiny test all those years ago, the Tweet-Up made it into the program next year—with some light refreshments.
