I’ve made it one of my goals recently to try and get a bit more involved with local events and the local community, meet new people and get contacts in the industries I’m interested in. Cambridge is a good place to do this as it hosts many events and meetups, catering to technology geeks, creative people, internationals and whatever else may take my fancy. 
So I started going, and I’m really enjoying it so far, most recently at last week’s CamCreative MeetUp.
But surprisingly, there’s one thing that has made the biggest impact on my experience of the events so far:
I’ve got a smartphone. And so do a lot of the other attendees.
I can be standing at an event, listening to an interesting talk and taking action at the same time.
Having a smartphone during events has allowed me to:
- Engage in conversation with other attendees – by following conversations that are happening online during the event, either through searching for topics or the specific hashtags on Twitter
- Find people that I want to speak to but may not know they were coming (or can’t see amongst the crowd)
- Connect with the people that I do meet – now it doesn’t matter if someone forgot their business cards, having a smartphone allows me to add them on social networks there and then and I can also make sure I’ve got the correct spelling of their name
- Look up information and links that were mentioned during the talk/event
- Show my work, an interesting piece of software, a case study, or whatever else I happen to be talking about to the other attendees
In short, it allows me to make an instant connection, right there and then. No more lost business cards. No more explaining something that could make so much more impact if only I was able to show a video.
Smartphones transforming our interactions…
Michael Schrage, over at the Harvard Business Review blog, has recently written a very interesting piece entitled How Your Smartphone Will Transform Your Elevator Pitch.
In it he focuses on the value smartphones can bring to those that need to present their business, their skills or their work, right there in the moment when you’ve met someone new and your “pitch” will either make them interested or will result in nothing but a polite smile. Smartphones can transform the way you interact with people and can give you more credibility and an opportunity to gauge the interest of your new contact.
He writes:
It’s no longer about what you say and how you say it; it’s increasingly about what you hand over. What do you hand over that transforms the conversation? What do you hand over that visually and interactively adds value to your spoken words? What do you hand over that complements and supplements your pitch? What do you hand over that invites and inspires the curiosity you want? What do you hand over that makes you more persuasive? These are the questions that will increasingly shape tomorrow’s rhetoric of innovation. The design challenge here is fantastic: how do we use mobile devices not to better connect us to digital networks but to better connect us with customers, clients, and prospects.
What do you think? Have you used a smartphone to make connecting with people easier and more memorable?
Edit: I should have also pointed out that despite the potential advantages, smartphones can also harm rather than aid interactions and communication, especially if one spends too much time during an event doing stuff on a smartphone rather than actually talking to the other attendees.
Photo credits Johan Larsson
