How to Make Guests Feel Comfortable at Networking Mixers

Networking events are a great way to make connections and meet new colleagues or potential clients. Connecting with other businesses at local networking events can help you get that much needed exposure for your business, however walking into a room full of strangers is often daunting for most people. If you host events that include networking, in order to successfully help your attendees achieve their networking goals, there are different networking activities that you can do to help facilitate those connections. Here are some ideas:

Speed Networking: Similar to the concept of speed dating, this activity insures that everyone gets to meet everyone else at the event, just for a couple minutes. This quick meeting is long enough just for introductions and a business card exchange. Once the speed networking session is over, you can seek out the new connections that you found most interesting and talk some more either at the event or after it is over.

Networking BINGO: This is a fun networking game where everyone gets a “BINGO Card” upon entering the event. Each card is a grid of anywhere from 9 to 12 topics and the goal is to find someone that fits the topic, question, or feature written in the grids, checking off that box after getting a business card or signature from that person. The goal can be for a straight BINGO or even a full card for ambitious networkers. Completed cards can be entered into a drawing if you have a prize to give away. Ideas for the game grid boxes could be:

• Find someone who has a Blackberry Phone
• Someone who has more than 1500 Twitter Followers
• Two people who went to the same school
• Find someone who sells [fill in the blank].

Find Your Match: As each person comes in, they pick a topic out of the jar (written on a piece of paper). The object is to find the one other person who received your matching topic. All topics should be valid to your event to help get people talking about current events that have to do with your industry or event.

Guru Tables: Set up tables based on hot topics in your industry. Have each table manned by a host, preferably someone with knowledge about that topic to facilitate discussions about the latest news on that subject.