The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed many constraints on our lives. Most widely affected are any activities involving multiple people gathering in one place. We’re seeing schools, offices, movie theaters, restaurants, and the like shut down or heavily adapting their mode of operation. So it’s no surprise that some of the biggest technology conferences in the world are exchanging conference centers for video conference platforms.

While CES goes all-digital, other events: Mobile World Congress, and Facebook Global Marketing Summit have been canceled altogether.

These events are focused around technology showcasing but the massive potential for networking is impossible to ignore. Thousands of people working in connected industries creates a kind of “fish in a barrel” effect—a sort of haven for face to face networking. With conferences going virtual, how will networking opportunities be affected? We plan to explore this question and offer a few solutions.

Adapting your networking efforts

Just buying tickets and showing up to a conference hoping to run into the right people has become less and less effective as these events continue to grow. The space alone that you would need to cover at an event like CES would prove impossible.

CES, spanning multiple buildings and floors, is not the type of event you want to go into without a plan. Image source.

Event organizers combat this issue by creating their own “meeting platforms” where attendees can create profiles for their businesses and book meetings with each other before stepping foot in the conference center. This is a great way to find potentially valuable connections and make the first touch in advance. But as a tool design to facilitate fruitful conversations in-person, it falls short of being a pandemic proof solution.

#business #conference #neural networks