Experience 10 – Lead Your Own Networking Group

Since this is the first Experience that was tested out in our initial testing phase back in June and also the first Experience to be booked in September, it seems appropriate to go through the logical steps that you may use to justify booking this experience to test out with your own networking group.

1. Networking is a great way to start and develop relationships. This may be for social purposes, for business purposes, for community building purposes or for organisational purposes, by which I mean bonding within an organisational setting and establishing workable structures.
2. The best way to Network is, without doubt, to meet in person. We are social animals and we like to meet, greet, chat, eat and drink, hang out and reveal who we are to each other using facial expressions, body language and hand signals, amongst myriad different ways we have of communication, including language and the way we choose to use it to express precisely our meaning.
3. Unfortunately, meeting in person is not always possible, or convenient. It usually involves some sort of carbon polluting travel, such as cars, trains, buses and planes. Recently, as we all know from two years of tough experience, sometimes restrictions are imposed by the authorities to prevent us getting up-close and personal. It may be that, in years to come, as more zero net carbon restrictions come into place and costs of energy continue to rise, it will become normal to find alternative ways, without travel, to continue to enjoy networking meetings.
4. Recently it has become more normal for online meetings to take place rather than having networking meetings in person. This is often regarded as a poor second best to real life but this method is now often used to communicate. We even see this method appearing on TV interviews to communicate long distance without the expense and inconvenience of travel.
5. VR provides a new and exciting way of ‘being there’ in a virtual meeting room with others, who may actually be on the other side of town or even on the other side of the world. It makes use of avatars, who can have a similar appearance to ourselves, and a wide variety of different virtual environments for our meetings, such as conference rooms, sitting round a campfire, auditoriums, lecture theatres, luxury yachts, space stations etc depending on the atmosphere and ambience that best suits the meeting concerned.
6. VR is not the same as a real life meeting and never will be. Whether it makes a better alternative than ‘talking heads’ for your online meeting is up to you to decide. It is viable now and being used throughout many large businesses and organisations right now. Many find they can meet, greet, chat, hang out and use facial expressions, body language and hand signals as an avatar. They can also use their own voice in just the same way as real life to choose the right language and to convey their meaning. They can also use whiteboards and post-it-notes, give presentations on large screens, use break-out spaces for one-to-one private conversations and switch environments at a flick of a switch if less or more show-up for the meeting. It is saving both costs and time and proving more convenient for more and more people every day.

If you are part of a regular networking group in the Lancaster area then why not try out this experience for five at a time from your group for only £10 for the hour.  We provide the headsets and enough space at Fraser House Hub at White Cross to spread out and simulate being in different places while meeting in the same virtual room, included in this price. You will have to travel there from home this time, but if you like this way of doing things your future plans could include buying your own headsets and meeting regularly from the comfort of your own home.

Ask for Experience 10 when you book for five people