Do you ever feel like being a speaker who looses the contact to audience after a succesful and interactive presentation?
I have had that kind of feeling several times. You are invited as a speaker to an exotic location, during and after the presentation you have many interesting conversations and you exchange business cards. BUT, keeping contact to those interesting people is a pain, it is delayed and sometimes you even forget the whole thing.
I have not been very systematic in my (people) networking strategies. Therefore, the article by Uzzi and Dunlap in the recent HBR was an eye-opener to me. It helped me to map my contact network and deficiencies in my networking strategies. It also brought valuable insights to my research and artefact building. I have earlier written about Technology Brokering and had interesting discussions with Andrew Hargadon. This brokering process is not always simple in a chaotic business/research world, therefore we had also discussions about teams and their time management. Techology Brokering is very much about utilising people networks as a source of new ideas. Similarly, Peter Denning wrote about Social Life of Innovation and his "Personal Foundational Practices of Innovation" may provide a functional networking strategy?!
Are there technological solutions to ease this (people) networking process? How about:
- Your blog would answer those questions that were left unanswered in in your keynote
- The recorded session of your presentation in the organisations's video database would include your blog trackback and latest posts. (My thanks to Conor Vibert, who is an expert in this area and who helped me see the big picture :-)
- Pod-casting would enable you to comment directly to those people who are in the listening mode
- Your blog reader would enable you to read and comment blog messages offline.
- All this would minimise your stay-in-touch efforts and let you work without extra e-mail and phone call burdens.
I may be too (techno-)optimistic here ;-)
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