Event Industry News’ journalist, James Dickson, spoke to Deal Room Events’ co-founder and CEO, Erdal Kilinc, about the techniques, advantages and values of networking at live events. Networking is a crucial element of live events for creating valuable business connections, engaging with like-minded industry people and gaining insightful information. Networking apps and platforms ease the process of making these connections with people who are often strangers. Deal Room is an online platform created to enhance networking at live events. Over a year of academic research, workshops, surveys and feedback from event professionals went in to designing it to ensure it could provide organisers with all the features and benefits suitable for business networking. Discussing the uptake of networking apps and platforms by the event industry, Kilinc said: “At tech events, almost all of them have to have a networking application because the demand from start-ups, investors, et cetera, is high. “If your networking application fails, you are basically ruining the whole event.” Playing devil’s advocate, James argued that attendees would still be able to network without such event platforms. However, he agreed that the rate for success would be much lower due to there being less information available regarding who certain delegates should approach to make a valuable connection. If you would like to feature on one of our weekly podcasts, please email [email protected].

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.