Turning your online network into a face-to-face network

Josh Shear has a nice blog post about meeting people face-to-face that he's interacted with on Twitter. We tend to think that our online acquaintances and friends are only people that we see online, but often they become people that we interact with face-to-face at local events and conferences. They may become people that we do business with or that we collaborate with on projects.

Turning your online network into a face-to-face network happens with a little effort. You coordinate a local tweetup or host a tweetup as part of a conference. Mashable gives useful advice for tweetup do's and don't's. While you may think that just one tweetup is enough, I can tell you from experience that some people who want to attend won't be able to and that there will be others who will not have heard that it is happening. Therefore, do a series of them and encourage participants to spread the word about them.

You might also identify specific people that you would like to get to know better. Consider having breakfast, coffee or lunch with these people. Why breakfast, coffee or lunch? These are time-bounded commitments, so if the meeting doesn't go well, your commitment is only an hour max. If the meeting does go well and you'd like to interact with that person more, then you can set up a follow-up event. (Be sure to pick a neutral and safe place for your first meeting. Even though you have gotten to know this person online, it's always good to be a little cautious with your first f2f meeting.)

Of course, one of the best ways of meeting online buddies f2f is to realize that you are all going to the same event and can meet there. Because you're at an event, it means that you have someone in common that you can discuss, which may make that first f2f more comfortable. This happened to me at the Chris Hughes event where Josh Shear introduced me to Patrick Shaughnessy and others. I also got to meet Bradford Morse, who I traded tweets with during the event. And I connected with people who I knew but didn't realize that they had a Twitter account. We found each other through the events hashtag.

As Josh says:

For those of you who are worried that spending too much time on a network like Twitter is going to cut down on your face-to-face time with people, you need to re-think that....it's a pretty simple tool that costs exactly nothing to expand both your social and professional networks. Seriously.