Urban Hike Roundup

Tony Stubblebine — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:20:37 +0000

Sarah wrote up our Urban Hiking experience for the NY Times small business section. Turns out these Urban Hiking expeditions aren’t just grand adventures. They also help us keep in touch with our contacts. A lot of career advice about networking talks about how you have to spend time maintaining your network. Let me tell you, if you live in the boonies and spend all your time working it takes some explicit action to keep your friends and colleagues from forgetting about you. Plus, ever since I turned my hobby into a business I can’t tell the difference between my work life and my social life.

BoingBoing gave it a mention. Plus we have a write up of the points of interests and some photos.

I think we’ll do another one in august covering some combination of telegraph hill, nob hill, and pacific heights. I want to see parrots and get some history on the city founders. If you can recommend any points of interest in those areas, send them over.

Four Tips for Conference Social Networking

Four Tips for Conference Social Networking

Tony Stubblebine — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 07:46:49 +0000

I posted some tips for conference social networking to the Future of Web Apps network. I think they’re applicable to anyone using CrowdVine for Conferences.

A great conference happens when everyone is having fantastic hallway conversations. We setup CrowdVine networks to make it easier for you to find people in the hallway. If you’ve never used a social network at a conference (or even if you have) here are four tips for making the most of it.

1. Find people you want to meet

You can search, you can browse by tag, or you can browse other people’s contacts. For example, if you need help at work implementing OpenID, you should search the network for OpenID and introduce yourself to the OpenID experts. If you have a new Rails plugin that you want to publicize, then you should make a point of meeting all the other people who tagged themselves “ruby on rails”. If you want to do business deals, then you might want to browse the “CEO” tag.

2. Make yourself visible

Use a recognizable profile photo. You’ll be surprised how many people recognize you and introduce themselves.

Then take a few minutes to fill out your profile and answer the profile questions. You just need to give enough information for other people to understand your expertise and interests.

3. Contact people

If you mark someone as a fan, they’ll show up in your network. It’s the digital equivalent of waving hello. You can also track the their blog posts and popular sessions from your My Network tab.

If you mark someone as want-to-meet, you’re expressing some interest in actually talking face-to-face. They’ll receive an email and at least know that you’d like to introduce yourself. That’s miles better than interrupting someone’s conversation and then explaining who you are.

For anybody that you want to connect with, try leaving a comment. That can be a great endorsement for the person. It’s also a terrific way to ask a question or explain why you want to meet.

4. Recognize that there are no obligations

People come to conferences for different reasons. Not everyone you contact is going to contact you back. Likewise, you shouldn’t feel obligated to connect with everyone who contacts you.

Bonus tip #5. Enjoy yourself! This is social software.

Stubbleblog » networking