How social is networking?

I was talking to one of my MBA colleagues this afternoon about networking.  I asked her whether people are organising meetings any better now than they did 20 years or so ago (not that she is old enough to address that question exactly but that was the comparison I was wanting to make).

I remember when a group of us established a branch of the Institute of Marketing (as it was at the time) in Cambridge.  We were all young, the city was quite small then and the viability of the branch was a little fragile so we had to do everything we could to keep people coming to meetings.  We had several people who had the specific task of greeting people and introducing them to someone else.  Nobody was left on their own.  As a committee, we tried to know everyone.  We weren’t a bunch of mates meeting up but a welcoming, professional team running a welcoming, professional event.


This was about 20 years ago and I was immensely pleased when I returned to live in Cambridge a few years ago that the branch still does all these things.  Sadly, my colleague says that many of the meetings and “networking opportunities” she has gone to exhibit all the bad characteristics we reacted to and changed all those years ago.  Friends and business associates talk together and make no effort to welcome anyone new.  Cliques all round.  Groups with a greater proportion of women are a bit better, she suggests, but it can still be a miserable experience and, if it is, so she doesn’t go back.

Have we learnt nothing?  Don’t we know how to be civil to people?  Do these same organisations worry about not having new people joining, their declining membership or their rising age profile?  I don’t believe that networking online entirely fills this gap, even for people a lot younger than I am.