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4 lessons for conference-goers from TED2012: Attend with purpose, perfect your pitch …

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Speed Meeting at TED2012 — 3 minutes to share who you are. Photo: Robert Leslie

This thoughtful blog post from Hadiyah at Engineers Don’t Blog contains four great takeaways for conference-goers:

TED2012 and why conferences will never be the same

From the post:

2. Attend a conference with a purpose. I previously despised networking at conferences. It was rare that I received any value. And being a pure introvert, most networking events left me mentally exhausted. It’s worth it to do a little research on those in attendance and make an effort to meet people of interest. Often the person of interest is not the ‘celebrity’ of the conference, but someone who may be more accessible — but you can still learn their experience and their connections. It also helps to set goals before attending a conference. What are you trying to accomplish from attending the conference? Be specific in your goals. ‘Meet people’ is not a specific goal; you can meet people at the supermarket. One of my goals from TED was to ‘Connect with developers working with Big Data.’

Read all four lessons at Engineers Don’t Blog >>

PS: Mitch Joel underscores this point on the Huffington Post: “If you could be in a room with over one thousand of the world’s most interesting business leaders, thinkers, scientists and artists, would you spend every free moment sitting in the corner alone thumbing your smartphone?”