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How much is too much?
Even the world’s biggest social media geeks know there’s a limit to the amount of time you can spend online. Last decade’s online chatrooms and listservs, once deemed nerd havens for the socially awkward, have given way to online terrain that nourishes some of the biggest social butterflies in business today. The celebrities of social media aren’t just prolific online — they’re working convention ballroom floors and networking events. The nexus between online interaction and offline face time is where online worlds meet and reinforce each other even as the line between the two remains.
Sometimes, that connection is more of a collision — one that can overwhelm even the savviest social media networker with inbound requests for time and attention.
Well-known social media consultant Chris Brogan, for example, reached his own limit some time last month. “I can’t keep up,” he wrote in a blog post. He estimates staying abreast of comments to his blog, inbound e-mail messages, Facebook shout-outs and Twitter updates would cost him 15 hours a day, without actually producing anything.
For Joselin Mane, who’s behind the Boston Tweetup calendar of events, the line between looking at a screen and talking to people face-to-face is simple to define. It falls every weekday at about 6 p.m. — “prime time” for events, he said. After spending most of the day connecting with people online, finding out who’s going where, he picks an event or two and heads out in person. “It’s a combination of the online and offline,” he said. “When people have events, they realize that there is an online aspect to it. How do you generate the qualified leads? How do you create a sales funnel?”
To that end, Mane’s Boston-based company, Litbel Consulting LLC (which stands for “Life Is To Be Lived”), provides online marketing for offline events — pushing the buzz and chatter leading up to an event and helping manage the follow-up afterward. He says that physical and online events support one another, “What tends to happen is relationships get stronger at a physical event. Once we get back online there’s just that much more responsiveness.”
For Mane, the intersection between online and live often involves a “tweetup” — an informal event organized via the social microblogging service Twitter using a hashtag, or online label. Often it goes alongside other “main dish” events, Mane explained.
“If you have a paid conference, the ideal scenario is to create a free networking session that helps promote that paid event,” he said. “Now you have people who weren’t able to attend the paid event meeting people who have paid, to get a sense of whether they want to go to the event or not.”
Sometimes, informal gatherings take place without the underpinning of a larger event. In these cases, it’s the participants’ connections through social media that bring them together — usually in a restaurant or a bar.
Oneforty Inc. CEO and founder Laura Fitton staked her business on people’s use of Twitter, but she still sings the praises of face-to-face contacts made away from a computer screen.
Formal events sometimes lack what’s needed for good networking, she said. “I make more valuable contacts literally out drinking... The ability to make meaningful contacts during parties is fantastic.”
Fitton and recent Oneforty hire Jason Evanish, who is also founder of Greenhorn Connect, an online network of resources for entrepreneurs, recently used the hashtag — #startupsdrinkboston — to gather staffers and CEOs casually after work in Central Square’s budding startup scene. “People like to work with people they like,” Fitton said. “Getting to know people socially in a mildly professional context is very important.”
For Evanish, larger events and conferences often have too much going on. Informal gatherings offer better opportunities to spend more than a couple of minutes with each person.
“Because it’s a more relaxed environment, conversations are longer,” he said. “You don’t feel as if you’re on a mission to connect with 20 people.”
DartBoston founder Cortlandt Johnson started his Pokin’ Holes networking events, in which young business founders present their companies to other young entrepreneurs in a casual setting, for some of the same reasons. “We want to create more of a party atmosphere that’s really geared around the startup culture,” he said in a recent interview. “We try to do our events at bars. This Thursday we’ll be at a bar on Landsdowne Street in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood where they have live-band karaoke. People get to interact in different ways. It’s not all business.”
He noted, “Not everything can be just about business. If you don’t do things with people how can you build a relationship?”
But Johnson’s events begin and end with online media: blog posts and tweets to promote the event and, later, a video posted online for those who couldn’t make it. The live event strengthens the connections made through the digital channels, and vice-versa, he said.
Brogan, of New Marketing Labs LLC, said he also prefers smaller events — but for different reasons. Festival-scale events are no longer useful for finding the type of large clients he’s hunting, he wrote in an e-mail. “I’m trending toward smaller events that have more high-quality attendees,” he wrote. “I have to focus on events that focus more on doing business and less on being cool.”
To do that, the online component is key, because it’s where socializing and planning take place, Brogan wrote. “Then the face-to-face is more for tire-kicking and potentially signing the contract. That’s the beauty of it. It’s more effective.”
With more and more people wanting to know who’s going before committing to an event, it’s important to advertise the guest list however possible, Mane said. Having that quality is what has made tweetups successful as a meeting format — because their guest list is created in a public format, he said. A search of the hashtag on Twitter reveals everyone who’s planning to show up.
“(Social media) have made it much easier for me to make the decision about going to an event. Now I know who’s going to be there,” Mane said. “That’s one of the secrets of having a good event — to expose who’s going and building off the reputation of the individuals who are going to be there.”
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