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Skip the door, stand by drinks
The start zone
A research team mapped where people walked at speed networking events and found good places and bad places to stand. The area near the door, the check-in table, and the coats, which one researcher calls the start zone, produced the shortest conversations. Arrivals are scanning the room for the host, the bathroom, the coats, and the food, so they are not ready for a real connection and give autopilot answers before heading to get a drink.
The bar exit
The longest conversations and the most exchanged business cards happened right as people exited the bar. Nervous arrivals head for a drink because something in the hand gives them something to do. They wait in line, get the drink, take the first sip, and turn to face the room. In those ten seconds they are ready to connect.
Making the approach
Someone standing right there can save them from not knowing whom to talk to, with a line like asking what wine they chose. For people at an event alone, standing in the eye line of the host or the most connected person works too, since a host who spots them may wave them over to meet a friend.
How do researchers track where people go?
Researchers often outfit attendees with small wearable badges. At MIT, Alex Pentland's group built sociometric badges that record movement, proximity, and speech patterns without capturing what is said. The SocioPatterns collaboration used radio-frequency tags at scientific conferences to log face-to-face contacts. Some of its datasets have been released publicly for other scientists to analyze.
How close do people normally stand?
In his 1966 book The Hidden Dimension, the anthropologist Edward Hall described four distance zones in North American culture. Intimate distance reached out to about 18 inches, personal distance ran to about 4 feet, and social distance, used for business and casual acquaintances, extended to about 12 feet. Beyond that lay public distance, the range of lecturers and speakers. Hall observed that these distances vary across cultures.
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