Josh Constine of TechCrunch reports,
Forbes is building a social networking app exclusively for these millennial leaders, which will launch at its 30 Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia on October 4. The goal is to stoke this community into somewhat of an alumni network that attracts more powerful youngsters to the Forbes empire. It will offer a directory of members, a feed where they can post social media stories or polls, and the option to message each other.
This ties in very loosely to something I have been thinking about, following a conversation with the UK’s Stephen Brien. That is, from a PSST perspective, what can be done to combat a recession? I talked about how World War II created new social ties among American servicemen, leading to businesses being formed by buddies who had met during the war. Stephen coined the expression “shaking the kaleidoscope” to describe doing something that might lead people to create new patterns of specialization and trade.
Experiments with new forms of social networking might be a way to shake the kaleidoscope. Is there a way to foster better connections between people in small-town Ohio and people in coastal cities? Between loud-mouthed sales people and quiet engineers?
When I started an Internet business in 1994, I kept in mind a documentary called “The Compleat Beatles,” in which early on the narrator says that “They were lucky, meeting the right people and playing the right clubs at critical moments in their careers.” This led me to try a lot of networking opportunities, hoping that I would meet the right people. Almost all of my efforts led nowhere, but two of them brought me my key partner and my key software engineer, without whom I would have had no chance. You could say that I shook the kaleidoscope a bunch of times, and a couple of times I got lucky.
Anyway, what I have in mind is not an app or a local happy hour. I am thinking in terms of in-person events that combine people from different backgrounds and different locations. Conferences sort of do that, except that people often have very similar backgrounds and many conference organizers put too much focus on speakers and not enough on creating opportunities for connection.
Suggestions welcome.