Last night saw the first ever Northern Digital meetup, at Socio Rehab in Manchester. As a rule, I don’t usually go in for networking events but there were a few people I knew attending so I opted to go along.
Organised by local freelancer Matt Booth, the meetup promised to be less geeky than other similar events across the city and it did seem to be populated by a nice hybrid of front-enders, back-ends and er, flash(ers).
Meeting people is easy
I met quite a few new people including, Paul Smith, some guys from Fudge, some people from Reading Room and some more people from LOVE. but, to be fair, I went with them so they don’t count.
I didn’t exchange any business cards; not that I have any anwyay, but it didn’t feel, like the forced breed of networking shindig where business cards and cheesy elevator pitches get exchanged between goons in suits. It felt more like a night at the pub with the twist that striking up a conversation with a group of strangers was made much easier due to a combined interest in… web design.
The meetup mostly took over the population of the bar but there were a few non-digitals in there – poor them, if they wandered into a conversation about Actionscript or CSS and got stuck.
Summary
Networking can often be fantastically dull, but it is important for both freelancers and fulltimers to actually get out there and get on with it. I’m grateful a local meetup of this calibre now exists which allows us all to get to know our peers a bit better.
I’d like to do something similar in Newcastle; other networking events for web people are i) over-priced and ii) too formal.
Maybe I was too drunk, or maybe it was too busy – but Socio seemed really tiny last time I went there, how did you network? And don’t they play loud music?
@Richard: It seems relatively easy enough to do, get over to meetup.com and just start a group.
@Dan: I won’t lie and pretend I’m a fan of the bar but it wasn’t too loud. Had it been on a weekend then 30+ webbies and the normal clientèle would have been a squeeze but as it was – only creatives were in there so there was plenty of room.
Hi Phil, just found this post via site stats. Thanks for the mention, it was good to meet you the other week.
A few more BBC people might be coming and I know of some people from other agencies that might show up too. I thought it was worthwhile, I got some sound advice from you and a few others that were there.
Anyway, hope your work at LOVE is going well. – Paul.