Being there

Editorial

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Thursday, 01 September 2011
I like being around people. In theory. So as a person who kind of suffers from social phobia, and working in an industry filled with a lot of smart people — to the point of intimidation — I’ve often found myself more adept at communicating digitally than by meeting face-to-face, or even talking with them on the phone.

Email, messaging, texting and, of course, social media play into this handicap all too well. They provide a platform upon which one can assemble and disseminate a highly-tailored version of oneself, but more to the point, not have to deal with all the nuances of face-to-face interaction — despite the fact that social interaction is so ingrained in human evolution.

There is a certain amount of security one feels in not having to deal directly with another human being. You don’t have to worry if your breath stinks, if there is a spot on your shirt, if what you are speaking makes any sense, if your hair is in place (or if you even have hair), if that weird eye-tic is sending another person a distorted message.
I’m probably not alone in feeling this. Yet, I do, as I’ve said, like being around people. I just don’t like worrying about it. And since taking on my role at Reseller News, where we from time-to-time discuss the benefits and pitfalls of the social networks as business tool, it’s become more apparent to me that if you want to get anything done, it’s often imperative to just show up.

This is probably obvious to a lot of people, too. Everyone from New Zealand that I talked to at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles last month, said that one of the benefits of travelling 12 hours across the ocean was the chance to meet face-to-face with Microsoft partners from back home. I thought this was mildly amusing at first, but it made a lot of sense. Doing business chains you to your desk, so without a good excuse, it is sometimes hard to justify a face to face meeting, especially if the person you meet is located on the other side of the country.

Organisations understand this well, which is why so many of them entice their business partners to come to informal gatherings where business isn’t the obvious justification, but it gets done, usually over a beer or two. Renaissance, Express Data, Maclean Computing, NZICT — to name a few — have been doing this, and from an editor’s perspective, they have all been pretty useful for learning about the industry, and digging up stories.

A recent addition to the IT social-business scene is something called A Few Quiet Yarns, held once a month in bars around the Auckland CBD. The one gathering I attended had no particular agenda, at least none that I could see on the surface, but did put a lot of people in the industry into one room, just to talk. I ended up talking the ear off one person that night, and apologised for going on and on about the fiscal situation back in the United States. “No, it is ok,” the person quipped. “At least we weren’t talking about IT.”

I didn’t really talk about IT with anyone that night, but I still happened to get a story out of the gathering.

What I like about A Few Quiet Yarns is that its organiser, Ryan Ashton, leveraged his connections on LinkedIn to promote it. In a way, this illustrates a true business utility of social networking platform, while the actual gathering demonstrates that no matter how many friends you have on Facebook, it is always better to be there in person.