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Socialising and Networking

Byrichard

After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.


I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.


That’s why you go to the edit suites, radio studios and other places. You have the opportunity to chat with people and to learn more about their projects and about technologies that you may not play with for your profession. That’s also when people asked me for help with editing. “How do I do this?”, “How do you do that?”, “Can we work together on that project”.


In post-university life it’s much harder to meet people and socialise like this. On the one hand, the pool of people is much larger. You’re dealing with thousands of people, rather than hundreds. You also need to find places where there are groups to connect with.


For a while, social media filled this role. So does work where you’re in the real world rather than the virtual. I see office life as virtual because when you’re working in an office you’re not meeting people in person. You don’t have the same opportunities for friendships.


Recently I’ve been volunteering at Geneva-based events to meet new people and see interesting projects. It’s a series of events where we’re needed for three or four hours every few days. It’s great if you want free access to an event but I find that it lowers the chance to meet people.


The best events to volunteer for or participate in are those where people are present for the entire time of the event. You meet them at the stands, you meet them at the drinks and other events, and you meet them in the evening. It’s a way of becoming a close group, even if just for a week. It did result in follow up projects.


Growing your network: Finding rockstars from Building Professional Relationships by Skyler Logsdon


I would love to work where I’m in the real world, meeting people and collaborating with a number of teams in person rather than by e-mail or over the phone. In a recent contract, an entire unit came to my end of contract drinks. That doesn’t happen every time.

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On moving from the Social media capital of Europe to Geneva

Byrichard

As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.

Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.

In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.

I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.

Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.

Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.

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England is Top EU country for social networking

Byrichard

According to a recent article in the Times England is top EU country for social networking with 5.6 hrs a month spent on social networking websites such as Facebook:


Britons are the ‘social networking’ champions of Europe, displaying a far greater appetite for websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo than fellow citizens on the continent.


British internet users spent an average of 5.8 hours a month – about a 11 minutes a day – on such sites, in comparison with their nearest rivals the Germans, who spent 3.1 hours a month (6 minutes a day), according to research.


source It’s an interesting figure. Why would England be the top country for social networking? Does university attendance and movement from town to town make a difference? Does the fact that people are so spread across London mean that they are more inclined to stay in touch via electronic methods rather than in person?


I’d like more information on how they came up with these figures.