The Jeff Pulver Blog: Still Redefining the Business Networking Breakfast: Give Real-time Social Networking a Try

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January 11, 2008

Still Redefining the Business Networking Breakfast: Give Real-time Social Networking a Try

Friend of a Farmer in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan was the location for the NYC Social Media Breakfast “The only breakfast with real-time social tagging” which took place on the morning of January 10th. Around 85 people came out for the event.

Special thanks to: Andrew Lipson for checking everyone in and “working the door”; to Stephanie Agresta for ALL the work she did in helping to make the event happen and to Bill Sobel for lending me his portable microphone. And special thanks to everyone who came out.

I enjoy bringing together people who are part of my social network from both twitter and Facebook and watching my virtual network transition into a physical face-to-face network. It was a pretty interesting and fun experience for just about everyone.

The event was scheduled to run from 8:00 am to 10:00 am and at 11:20 am, the handful of people who were still there with me were asked to leave so the restaurant could get their tables setup for lunch.

To help with the networking, I provided name stickers and pens and asked the guests to include their Name and include a “personal tag line.” I also encouraged where possible, for our guests to bring a name badge with them. While some people struggled to figure out their personal tag line, seeing someone’s tag line provided a great conversation starter . I also provided smaller stickers to use for “Real-Time Social Tagging”, as I encouraged guests to tag each other the way we tag topics in our blogs.

For people who like to organize a “business breakfast”, I have found the social tagging/stickers to be a great icebreaker and it makes it so much easier for someone to go up and talk to someone they never met before. One of the benefits of using Facebook to manage an event is that since almost everyone who was at the breakfast has a presence on Facebook and was a member of the event, connecting with new friends after an event is now as simple as a mouse click. No business cards were needed.

Based on turnout and feedback received, I am looking at hosting another event in NYC in the near future. I am also working on a plan for 2008 to host similar breakfasts across the United States, something I’m calling project SoMBAA. SoMBAA stands for “Social Media Breakfast Across America.”

Please feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment below to suggest cities to visit to host a similar breakfast networking event. I’m currently working on my breakfast schedule.

More photos from the event can be seen on my facebook photo album and on flickr from: Bill Cammack, David Parmet, John Federico and some of our other guests.

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: New York, Andrew Lipson, Bill Sobel, Stephanie Agresta, breakfast, SoMBAA,real-time social networking, Facebook, Social Media, Jeff Pulver

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Posted by jeff on January 11, 2008 08:05 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: injection molding at June 16, 2009 09:21 PM

Great Post! Cheers!

Posted by: Gibline at February 19, 2008 08:03 AM

looks like a cool event. Would love to see something like that out west in Portland!

Posted by: jennifer at January 15, 2008 02:40 PM

Jeff,

All I can say is BRAVO!

It was awesome!

-Bill

Posted by: Bill Sobel at January 12, 2008 11:01 AM

Neat idea - real world networking with post-it notes for tags...almost quaint. ;)

Posted by: Don Jones at January 11, 2008 08:05 PM

January 11, 2008

Still Redefining the Business Networking Breakfast: Give Real-time Social Networking a Try

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