Maybe we all suffer from a collective amnesia? Unable to think before the era when people had a thousand Facebook friends yet knew no-one, before the day when endless selfies no longer seemed like vanity or messaging mania had set in – with countless couples sitting silently side by side in restaurants each immersed in their smartphone. Back then we did something called “talking face-to-face”, we could see each other’s body language, breath in tell tale pheromones, watch for blushes, the touch of clammy hands as we shook them, the true tone of voice undistorted by technology. We even “went out to see fiends” and “did business over lunch”.
As the march of digital ones and zeros invaded our lives we capitulated completely. No one called a truce, did a deal, asked that humanity could keep its deepest values, that people who walked the streets appearing to talk to themselves should be offered therapy instead of faster blue tooth connectivity. Most of us are not Luddites, few smash mobiles or take hammers to MacBooks. The agony is silent, the sense of loss confused. Nobody wants to stand up against progress, but so much of life’s vitality is rapidly draining away.
The true value of the Internet is that it is “world wide”. It creates the possibility of connections with those we would otherwise probably never meet. Yet such connections will remain limited and socially sterile unless contact results in physically getting together. That is the weakness at the heart if social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When doing business trust and one to one relationships are essential and that is why business travel has remained so important. But the potential of business travel is seldom realized. Meetings are arranged for the daytime, but in the evening there is often just the prospect of room service snacks in a faceless four-star hotel.
A new community called “Business Travel Networking”, or butN for short, uses technology to forge connections with the sole purpose of meeting face to face. It is being launched this week to FedEE members to help them re-establish traditional methods of doing business and fill all that wasted time during business trips. Instead of making expensive calls back to the office or working on spreadsheets in hotel rooms business travelers could more productively use their time to meet each other or professionals in the location where they are staying. butN helps them to do this by showing which potential contacts are in their vicinity.
There is nothing novel, of course, in proximity sensing – but now it has been put to use in a way that leaves the user in complete control. They can determine their visibility to others, search by profession, gender and distance and retain confidentiality of emails. No communication can take place unless both parties agree and if one party decides not to continue networking they can sever connection completely. A number of different language versions are in development and the system works equally well on mobiles, tablets and laptops. So once contact has been made it will be easy for each user to arrange one-to one meet-ups or even complete events ranging from an invitation to join them at the hotel bar to a more formalized networking event.
butN is free, safe and easy to use which makes it “really cool” and “fab” for the yuppie generation – now sadly not so young, but hopefully not too arriviste to want to be “chic” or impress too much with silly retro or French expressions.
For real business networking go to http://www.butn.co See you in the foyer in twenty minutes.