Social media and mobile tools are great for making and cultivating connections, but we still live in the real world, and a friendship is more than a "like", "link", "share" or "follow".
While participating online in the remote webcast of the 2013 PCMA Convene Conference I shared chat conversations with a smart person from Canada. I began following her in other social media communities, and we regularly saw each other's updates in Twitter, etc.... We both work in the meetings industry, and our paths continued to cross online over the past several months, but since I live in Texas, we had never met.
Meredith Low is a strategy consultant who works with association and other conference planners to improve their meetings. She lives in the very cool city of Toronto. In planning for my trip to the Blue Mountain Resort (2 hours north or Toronto) to speak for the Toronto Chapter of Meeting Professionals International at there two day education conference, I reached out to see if my virtual friend had time to grab dinner before I flew home to Austin.
It is great to make the face-to-face connections with people you only know online. Humans are so much more than their Twitter stream, blog, or Facebook status. We had fun talking about our businesses, the meetings industry, and life in general. She is delightful, and I look forward to keeping in touch and watching her consulting business continue to grow and thrive.
When you travel for business or pleasure it can be fun to meet the people you know from your online activities. And since humans are experiential beings, we create friendships when we share an experience. While not everyone you know online will transform into a friend, it is often worth the investment of time to get to know people. Sometimes it is as easy as asking if they have time to get together.
Have A Great Day.
thom singer
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