Coffee-powered Speed Networking

After the Festival welcome, it was time to kick off with speed networking.

What is speed networking and why is this a good way of connecting with people? 

Establishing professional connections is essential if you’re seeking to grow your business and build relationships. 

Speed networking offers you great exposure in a short amount of time, as well as the opportunity to meet a lot of people. It’s ideal if you don’t have a lot of time to invest in networking and if you’re more on the shy, introverted side. In fact, because of the fast pace of the interaction, everyone has to go straight to the point and there’s no need or time for small talk. 

How does speed networking work? 

The idea was that attendees meet each other in a series of brief one-to-one information exchanges of 2 minutes each. They were randomly assigned to breakout rooms where the conversations took place. There was no rule concerning what to talk about, but we all had to be mindful of the time. In the background, we kept track of time and would send reminders to give the floor to the other person as well.  

Or at least, that would have been the plan. 

But as the saying goes, be prepared for the fact that no plan would ever go according to plan.

And we miserably failed on the technical side of making things work.

We lost track of who met whom, who has been to which breakout room, and it all turned into an incredibly funny disaster situation. We (meaning: the organisers) just couldn’t stop laughing in what we started to call the ‘panic room’ aka the control room.

Lesson learnt!

Unfortunately, until Zoom doesn’t roll out a speed networking feature, it’s a format we simply can’t make work using this platform.

Still, it was fun, and we surely did manage to forge some new professional connections. At the end of the session, everyone was encouraged to share their links and virtual business cards with all the attendees in the chatbox, which we all saved before logging off to get to the next session.

Host of this session: