11 years ago, I pointed out that most meetings are small meetings. It seems the meeting industry is finally catching on to this reality and its benefits. Yes, small is the new big!
“Small is the new big. Smaller meetings, known by industry experts as micro events, continue strong growth. Simpler internal team meetings, VIP events, and client advisory boards will be among the most common types of meetings as we go forward. These are smaller (< 100 attendees) meetings, often held offsite. That doesn’t mean they don’t need all the things that larger meetings need, including speakers.” —Dave Reed, Joe Heaps and Roxy Synder, eSpeakers‘ report on IMEX America 2024
Why is this happening?
During the early COVID years, online meetings became the norm, while in-person gatherings dropped dramatically. Smaller online meetings revealed that broadcast-style webinars were often disengaging, while interactive online meetings helped attendees make peer connections and stay engaged.
As in-person events now return to pre-2020 levels, attendees increasingly value connecting and learning with peers, as Freeman reported in its Q1 2024 Trends Report:
“When it comes to networking, attendees are less interested in discovering new career opportunities and obtaining/providing mentoring. Instead, they view networking as the most valuable when they can exchange ideas with peers, meet new people, and speak with industry experts who may otherwise be out of reach.”
—Freeman Trends Report Q1 2024, Winter 2024 Freeman Syndicated Survey of Event Attendees.
“Attendees want to connect with peers over shared challenges and specific topics Just like with keynotes, content is critical when it comes to networking. Attendees want to bond with peers over shared professional challenges and topics. They aren’t as keen to speed-date over hors d’oeuvres or meet with an on-site ambassador at a phone charging station. These types of networking elements can be useful ancillaries – but they’re not sufficient on their own. Event attendees would be better served if organizers devoted more time to valued forms of networking and reduced their efforts on less-desired elements.” —Freeman Trends Report Q1 2024, Winter 2024 Freeman Syndicated Survey of Event Attendees.
Creating the valuable networking and connection that attendees seek is far easy at small meetings—when designed right! I’ve been designing and facilitating such meetings for over three decades, and both participants and organizers love them. These events foster a loyal community with high retention rates.
Large meetings can also support effective networking, but it’s far more challenging. As attendee expectations shift, more clients are contracting me to boost connection at large events, where existing tech solutions like brain dates and speed networking often fall short.
Meanwhile, small, well-designed events continue to thrive and grow in popularity. Small truly is the new big.
Next steps
Convinced that small is the way forward? Here’s how you should proceed:
Starting a new conference? Start small, with 50 – 150 participants. With the right design, you’ll create an event they’ll want to return to, year after year. You can then grow the event over time.
Struggling with a small conference? Your event design might need an update—I can help!
Running a large conference but receiving feedback about ineffective networking and connection? You’re not alone. I’m hearing from an increasing number of clients with this problem. Re-designing an existing event is challenging but achievable. The key lies in focusing on identifying, supporting, and connecting existing sectors and groups within the event. A small but impactful design shift early on can make a big difference. Contact me if you’d like to explore how this approach could transform your event.
Last week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)
Mastodon
Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.
“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.” —from a Mastodon blog post
No one owns Mastodon, it runs on free, open-source software. There are no ads. The platform has currently about 8 million members, with more arriving daily.
Anyone can set up a Mastodon server (aka instance) that focuses on a specific community of any kind. (For example, as I write this, journalists are flocking to Mastodon after Musk banned some, apparently for writing critically about him. Already, people have set up a number of instances for journalists.)
Mastodon works like Twitter but with longer posts (up to 500 characters) and important design differences that discourage those who are trying to build their followers and influence by any means possible.
Each Mastodon server has its own community, rules, admins, and moderation. Mastodon’s structure and moderation tools permit a series of efficient and immediate actions against “bad” accounts or instances, where “bad” is defined by the instance administrators and community.
Running a Mastodon instance requires some work and a fairly modest amount of money. The cost rises with the number of users, so you can start small and see how popular your instance becomes. A server with five thousand users currently costs ~$150/month for hosting and bandwidth. Many Mastodon servers are crowdfunded, though server admins are free to come up with other ways to cover costs. Some organizations set up their own instances for their employees and associated community.
The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?
Mastodon: An #eventprofs alternative to Twitter?
“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.” —Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter
Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?
The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.
That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.
The words we use for meetings matter. Unfortunately, familiar terms often perpetuate conventional meeting thinking. By changing the words we use we can change how we think about events. Here are three examples of better words to use when talking about meetings.
online rather than virtual
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, in-person meetings vanished overnight. Suddenly Zoom became a household word. If we couldn’t safely meet face-to-face we’d sit in front of screens.
But what should we call these internet-mediated meetings?
In July 2020 I suggested that we not call them virtual meetings. Instead, I made the case to use the word online. In essence, I pointed out that virtual has the connotations of “not quite as good” and unreal, while online is a neutral and well-established description of the meeting medium. Read the post for a detailed argument.
Though I don’t claim any credit, I’m happy to observe that meeting industry professionals and trade journals currently tend to prefer “online meeting” to “virtual meeting”, though there are some notable exceptions. Google also shows the same preference, with 5.0B search results for “online meeting” versus 1.3B for “virtual meeting”.
connection rather than networking
This is a big one, and a harder switch to make. The word networking has been used so often to describe what people do at meetings that it’s tough to supplant. But describing everything that happens outside event sessions as networking subtly directs attention away from what can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
We’ve biased how we talk about connection at meetings by using a word that is much more focused on personal and organizational advantage than personal and professional mutual benefits.
I lightheartedly titled my recent post on this topic “Stop networking at meetings“. But it’s a serious suggestion. Having a mindset of encouraging and supporting connection around useful content plus a set of meeting process tools that can make it happen is a game-changer for meeting effectiveness.
peer conference rather than unconference
Sadly, I’m a voice in the wilderness on this one. 13 years ago, I wrote Why I don’t like unconferences. As I explained in my first book, Conferences That Work, what people call an unconference is what a good conference should actually be. At unconferences, far more conferring goes on than at traditional events. I coined the term peer conference as an attempt to remove the “un” from “unconference”.
I was ignored.
This linguistic problem worsened as people decided that calling traditional events “unconferences” made them sound cool. They ignored the central feature of an unconference; that sessions are chosen at the event rather than scheduled in advance. These days I frequently see advance calls for speaker submissions at meetings advertised as “unconferences”! You even find traditional breakout sessions described as unconferences, presumably because more than one person might speak. I cover these depressing developments in These aren’t the unconferences you’re looking for.
Today, “peer conferencing” is principally used to describe an educational approach to writing in groups. So I’ve reluctantly given up trying to swim against the tide, and have been using the term unconference in my recent writing.
C’est la vie.
What do you think?
The words we use for meetings matter. My little campaigns to reframe some language the meeting industry uses have had mixed results. What do you think of my suggestions? Are there other examples of meeting industry language you’d like to see changed? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
P.S. Some meeting industry terms I like!
Apropos of nothing, here, in alphabetical order, are some meeting industry terms I like. Don’t ask me why.
It’s time to stop networking at meetings. No, I’m not saying we should only listen to lectures at meetings. Rather, I’m going to explain why using the term “networking” for all occasions when attendees get to talk with one another subtly directs attention away from can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
We talk about virtual networking not working as if the in-person networking has been fixed.
I agree with Victoria’s observation, but think it’s important to consider a wider perspective. Here’s an expanded version of my brief comment on the ensuing LinkedIn conversation.
Networking at meetings
When you imagine “networking” at meetings, what image comes to mind? You’ll almost certainly think of a group of people, either standing around or sitting, eating and talking to each other. When do these conversations occur? The dominant perspective of networking at meetings is that it happens during socials, meals, and breaks.
For some meeting constituencies, this is understandable. Suppliers, vendors, and sponsors are present to do business, meet up with existing customers, and get new ones. “Networking”, whether during a sponsored meal or social, or a tradeshow is an appropriate term. You’re building or strengthening your network of prospective and current customers. Note that networking is an asymmetrical process conducted by those who have something to sell with those who may be interested in buying.
Connecting at meetings
Participants, on the other hand, come to meetings for content and connection. That’s connection, not networking. Unlike networking, connecting is a fundamentally symmetrical process. Any participant may have something—information, a perspective, or a problem—worth offering or receiving. Connecting is a spontaneous peer-to-peer process, where meeting participants fluidly give and receive, learn and teach, through conversations and interaction. Connection can potentially benefit any participant, and the benefits are often mutual, i.e. connections made lead to positive outcomes for everyone involved.
When do participants connect at meetings? Traditionally, the answer is the same for connecting as networking: during socials, meals, and breaks. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Limiting connection to socials, meals, and breaks means participants miss out on the most powerful way to create connection at meetings: around relevant content.
In other words, there’s every reason to incorporate opportunities for connection into meeting sessions.
Meetings—whether in-person or online—that do this successfully are overwhelmingly preferred by nearly all participants. That’s why I’ve been designing and facilitating such meetings for the last thirty years. They work!
Facilitating valuable connection during meeting sessions
As you might expect, to facilitate valuable connection during meeting sessions it’s not enough to tell participants to go and talk to each other. Nor does it involve turning sessions into speed-dating or adding irritating “icebreakers”.
Instead, it means designing sessions that:
Improve learning by actively engaging participants around content rather than listening to it or watching it.
Leverage the rich and extensive knowledge and experience of participants in the room.
Increase opportunities to meet like-minded peers via discussion of session content, ideas, and questions.
In addition, you need to include sessions at the start of meetings where participants can learn about who else is present that they might want to get to know, where common issues and problems can be aired (and later addressed), and where relevant expertise and experience in the room is uncovered so that it can be tapped as needed.
Thinking of connection as networking skews perspectives
Labeling all occasions when meeting attendees converse as “networking” conflates fundamentally different means and goals of interaction into one bland term. Calling what happens outside the sessions “networking” obscures the rich possibilities of interaction between participants that good meeting and session designs provide.
So let’s stop talking about “networking” at meetings, and start talking about connection. More important: don’t just talk about it but use meeting and session formats that support and create connection around relevant content during the sessions!
If you can’t hang out with people in person, how can you best meet up with your tribe online? That’s the selling proposition for a host of new platforms that have sprung up over the last few months: creating a compelling online incarnation of the traditional conference socials we all know and love (or hate). Last week I got to try out a couple of these new platforms, so I thought I’d write a Gatherly versus Yotribe (NB: Yotribe has been rebranded as Wonder) review.
[Added November 23, 2020: after reading this review, see this post for an update on these two platforms and Rally.]
A maximum of around thirty people were present at any one time at the Gatherly test event, which I set up. I estimate there were around a hundred folks at the Yotribe event, which was organized by Anh Nguyen.
First, some context…
In-person conference socials
Imagine an in-person conference social. <sings>”It isn’t hard to do.”</sings> You enter the room and look around to see who’s there.
Perhaps you see people present whom you know. So you go over to them and say hi, or perhaps join a conversation they’re having with others. Perhaps you don’t recognize anyone. So you have to bravely sidle up to someone or a group and introduce yourself. Or insinuate yourself into a conversation. Perhaps you know there are people present who you’ve met online, but short of sneaking a look at everyone’s badge, there’s no easy way to find them.
During the social, you usually have multiple conversations with different individuals and groups. You move from one conversation to the next, as you and others desire. You may meet folks with whom you want to have a private conversation, so you go somewhere you’re unlikely to be interrupted.
These are the processes we take for granted at an in-person meeting social.
The inadequate networking functionality of most online meeting platforms
These days, we can network online via group messaging/text chat, audio chat, or video chat. (OK, yes, virtual reality has been available for a while too, but it hasn’t really taken off.) Just about all online meeting platforms now include traditional webinar style video conferencing, and many offer Zoom-style main room and breakout room meetings.
Many online meeting platforms tout their “networking” capabilities. When you look at the specifications, however, the majority offer only text chat! Some provide one-to-one networking via private video chat. And some describe their capability to support multiple video breakout rooms as “networking” — but this is disingenuous.
As anyone who’s tried to use Zoom breakouts for networking knows, the big barrier is that once someone’s entered a room, they can leave it to return to the main Zoom meeting but they can’t then move themselves to another breakout room. (Unless you make everyone a co-host, which is not a good idea for a meeting of any size, since a careless or malevolent co-host can cause havoc.)
Even if an online platform allows users to move between multiple breakout sessions, you still won’t experience something close to an in-person social. That’s because breakouts are fixed platform units that have to be set up in advance. There’s no easy way for three people, say, to decide they want to video chat about something amongst themselves for a few minutes, and then spontaneously split up and meet others.
Online conference socials using platforms like Gatherly and Yotribe
Online social platforms like Gatherly and Yotribe provide an experience much closer to that of an in-person social. They do this using a map interface that shows individuals or groups of people scattered around a room or rooms. When you join a social on one of these platforms, you find yourself as an name or photo on the map. You move around the map by simply clicking where you want to go.
If you move near another person’s name or picture, you’re automatically connected to them by video chat. If you move into one of the circles on the map — colored in the Yotribe screen shot above, or numbered (so-called “huddles”) in the Gatherly image below, you’ll automatically join a video chat with everyone in the circle/huddle. Finished chatting? Click on the map to move somewhere else to join someone else or another conversation! Or click on the map away from everyone else so you can answer that phone call you just got.
That’s the basic interface. All such platforms provide this birds eye view of the positions of everyone in the social and the same mechanism to move around and meet others. Of course, each platform does this a little differently, and they include additional functions, like text chat, which I’ll cover below.
Requirements
Setup on both platforms couldn’t be much simpler. Both are browser based, so there’s no app to download or software to install. Attendees are given a link and an (optional) password to join the social room.
Gatherly requires you talk with their sales staff to set up the meeting. This ensures they size your server correctly. They will give you a link to your room that you can distribute to attendees. Gatherly requires you to use the Chrome browser.
Yotribe can be set up without any input from a Yotribe human. Get your own room from the button on their home page! Once you have your room, you can set up a room background (see below), set a room password for attendees. You can also set up an “icebreaker question”, though I’m not a big fan of these.
Meeting size and conversation group size
How many people can be in a single meeting while supporting multiple on-the-fly group conversations? And how many people can be in a single on-the-fly video chat?
These are key questions!
Just eight years ago, public platforms that provided a stable video chat with a mere ten people (think Google Hangouts) were state of the art. Today, we take this kind of technology for granted. But supporting multiple constantly-reconfiguring video chats for hundreds of people is hard, and costs money.
Most platforms today use open source WebRTC technology, the availability of which allows small companies like Gatherly (a handful of computer science students in Atlanta, Georgia) and Yotribe (a few techies in Berlin, Germany) to create a pretty impressive fluid video chat infrastructure.
In my opinion, the one-to-one private video chat provided in several other online meeting platforms is not sufficient to offer an intimate and fluid social experience. This is a key differentiator for platforms like Gatherly and Yotribe.
Gatherly size issues
Gatherly asks meeting owners to provide the maximum number of people who will be in the room and the largest group video chat size desired. They then host your meeting on a server that can handle the required load. In a test meeting last week, Gatherly comfortably handled spontaneous video chats with ~15 people. This seems more than enough capability to me.
Yotribe size issues
Currently, Yotribe has a different approach. One of the Yotribe founders, Leonard Witteler, explains: “As thousands of participants join a room, we split the room into many areas and serve the smaller areas from a properly load-balanced backend.” In our test last week, Yotribe ran into problems with groups larger than about ten people. Since there’s no limit that can be set on a conversation group’s size, this could cause a problem any time a large number of people try to video chat with each other.
Yotribe’s effort to create a platform that automatically scales to handle varying loads is impressive. The automatic addition of “areas” — each restricted to a maximum of 36 participants in our test last week — as the number of participants grows is an ingenious approach to mitigating the increased demand on the video chat servers they employ. However, such a system needs to fail gracefully when its limits are met. Given that we were able to stress Yotribe with about 100 participants in our test event, currently I’d prefer a platform like Gatherly with known, preset limits that will handle a predetermined load for a production event.
Gatherly versus Yotribe features
There is one minor nomenclature difference between Gatherly and Yotribe. Gatherly calls video chat groups “huddles”, while Yotribe calls them “circles”. Both platforms allow attendees to mute their microphones and turn off their cameras as needed.
Neither platform has much in the way of documentation. That’s probably because the developers are constantly adding new features. Luckily, both interfaces are simple enough that it’s not hard to figure out how they work, though it took me a few minutes, which could disorient and discourage some first-time users. Adding a short, skippable tutorial for attendees to view before entering the room would be a nice addition.
Interface
There are numerous small but sometimes significant differences between the interfaces of the two products. I will concentrate on what I noticed that’s important to me.
Map interface
Gatherly shows individual attendees on the map by name. It displays current huddles as circles with numbers inside, the number representing the count of people in that video chat. Moving your cursor over a huddle shows a list of the names of everyone in it. This is an intuitive interface that makes it quite easy to find specific people in the room: they are either shown by name outside the huddles or one can “search” the huddles by moving your cursor over them.
Yotribe shows individual attendees as pictures, selfies that are taken by the attendee’s webcam before they enter the room. This is great if you recognize most of the people present. If you don’t — my experience at most events — you’ll need to hover your cursor over each image to see their name. This is time consuming if there are many people present. In addition, I didn’t find any way to discover who was in a circle other than joining it and scanning through the participants.
I found Gatherly far easier to use to find specific people, or browse who’s present, than Yotribe.
Yotribe does have one extremely useful feature. The room host can upload an image that replaces the blank room map (see example below).
By creating an appropriate image, you could designate portions of the room as numbered or named breakout rooms, exhibit booths, etc. Gatherly provides this functionality as a service on request. In my opinion, Gatherly should follow Yotribe’s lead and make map customization completely under host control.
Video chat
Gatherly has a Zoom-gallery-style video chat display. As the number of people in the huddle increases, the video windows get smaller, keeping everyone visible. This worked well during our test event.
In addition, Gatherly has what I’d argue is an essential feature that Yotribe lacks: the ability to lock a video chat at any time so no one else can enter. This allows two or more people to have a private conversation. Private conversations like this are impossible in Yotribe, which allows anyone to suddenly join a video chat circle at any time
Yotribe shows circle chatters in a strip at the top of the screen, like Zoom’s webinar view. In practice this means that circles with more than five people can’t display everyone on screen simultaneously. As a result it’s hard to tell who’s speaking in a large circle, and because people can arrive and depart at any time, you’re never quite sure who’s present.
Yotribe does offer an option to share your screen with others in your current circle, which could be useful though there doesn’t seem to be a way to zoom the image to full screen.
Text chat/messaging
Gatherly includes a simple text chat interface that allows you to see the names of everyone present, message another person, or message everyone in your current huddle.
Yotribe text chat includes the above functions, plus a broadcast chat mode that allows attendees to send a message to everyone. Gatherly needs to implement this! Message notifications in Yotribe are easily overlooked though; the only indication is a small yellow circle in the chat window and chat icon.
Pricing
Currently Yotribe is free! (I suspect this won’t last, so enjoy it while you can.)
Gatherly is currently using a $x/head pricing model, where x depends on the size of the event. Right now, I suspect they might be flexible. They were kind enough to offer me a free test event last week.
Quick comparison with Remo
Remo is another platform that offers multi-person, map-based video chat (and a lot more besides). I’ve only seen a brief demo of the product so I don’t feel qualified to provide a review here. The map is much prettier than Gatherly’s and Yotribe’s, and uses a set of various table sizes as a metaphor for conversations. It’s noteworthy that the pricing for Remo is based on the maximum number of attendees, meeting duration, and seats available at a table (currently 4 {$50 – $150/month} or 6 {$400 or $900/month}). This highlights the significant costs for providing the kind of server power needed to support fluid on-the-fly video conferencing.
Security
Gatherly says they use Amazon Web Services servers and end-to end encryption. They do not have access to any audio or video data; it’s briefly held to transmit it, but they do not store it, and employees do not have access. They offer password protection of rooms, and can include a waiting room (I did not see this) for you to vet attendees before they join. Finally, they provide “Kick and Ban features to ensure troublemakers stay out of your event”, which I didn’t see either.
YoTribe also allows a room password. Only guests who are in your circle can participate in your conversation; no one in the room can be invisible to you. Like Gatherly, Yotribe says it does not have access to any audio or video data; it’s briefly held to transmit it, but they do not store it, and employees do not have access.
Conclusions
On balance, I prefer the Gatherly experience to Yotribe, though both platforms are useful and solid enough for small events. Yotribe has a more party-like feel, which could be a good fit for a group that mostly knows each other. Gatherly does a better job, in my opinion, of creating an experience closer to that of a friendly conference social.
However, your needs are likely different from mine, so I’ve summarized what I see as the advantages of each platform below.
Gatherly advantages
Being able to lock a Gatherly huddle, so you can be sure of a private conversation is a big plus.
Gatherly’s Zoom-like video gallery view inside a huddle works well, allowing you to see everyone present. Yotribe’s scrolling strip of video windows only shows a fraction of the people in a large circle, and it’s difficult to figure out who’s there and who’s speaking.
Given Yotribe’s unpredictable loss of video chat functionality, I prefer to have Gatherly’s predetermined limits on event and chat size, allowing the platform to provide adequate power to reliably support the meeting.
I prefer Gatherly’s map interface to that of Yotribe. Yotribe’s attendee photo icons are great if you recognize most people. But seeing names moving around the map is more helpful in general. In addition, Gatherly’s ability to show you the names of the people in a huddle just by hovering your cursor over it is much more informative.
Yotribe’s advantages
For now Yotribe is free, and Gatherly costs $!
A Yotribe room can be set up and used without any communication with Yotribe, while Gatherly requires you talk to their sales staff first.
Yotribe has broadcast text chat, which Gatherly did not, though I’m told it will be added any day now.
Yotribe creates new rooms automatically when the number of attendees in any room exceeds 36. Gatherly says they will soon have a fixed room feature too, with “elevators” that allow you to move to a different floor (see the image below). I think this will likely provide an easier to navigate social meeting than YoTribe’s extra-room-on-the-fly approach.
Unlike Gatherly, Yotribe allows the host to upload an image file to replace the blank map where attendees roam. This is a very useful feature. I hope that Gatherly implements it soon.
Final words…
I hope you’ve found this Gatherly versus Yotribe review useful. I know that Gatherly is being constantly updated. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Yotribe developers are hard at work as well. So reviews like this are a moving target. Please share your experience with these platforms, new features, and things I’ve missed in the comments below!
11 years ago, I pointed out that most meetings are small meetings. It seems the meeting industry is finally catching on to this reality and its benefits. Yes, small is the new big!
Last week I wrote about 
The words we use for meetings matter. Unfortunately, familiar terms often perpetuate conventional meeting thinking. By changing the words we use we can change how we think about events. Here are three examples of better words to use when talking about meetings.
It’s time to stop networking at meetings. No, I’m not saying we should only listen to lectures at meetings. Rather, I’m going to explain why using the term “networking” for all occasions when attendees get to talk with one another subtly directs attention away from can be the most valuable outcome of well-designed meetings: connecting with others.
If you can’t hang out with people in person, how can you best meet up with your tribe online? That’s the selling proposition for a host of new platforms that have sprung up over the last few months: creating a compelling online incarnation of the traditional conference socials we all know and love (or hate). Last week I got to try out a couple of these new platforms, so I thought I’d write a 
When you join a social on one of these platforms, you find yourself as an name or photo on the map. You move around the map by simply clicking where you want to go.
