Making offline social networking easier
In Austin, we founded a massive free social event every month for people online to meet offline (#BASHH) and we do our best to help attendees to connect, but like any party or conference or networking event, some people walk in, scan the room for the people they know and flock to them, despite best intentions to meet new people. In fairness, our attendees are pretty good about people mingling, that’s their whole goal, but everyone’s guilty of seeking comfort in familiar faces from time to time.
Enter MingleBird.com, a play on the phrase “social butterfly,” as demonstrated in the video above which gives people an excuse to shake hands with new people (which can be absolutely terrifying to some people).
We see great promise for this app, especially at mixers and conferences where people play a game to check in with other people rather than places. We imagine after reading this, anyone that has a booth at an expo will be setting up a game or asking the conference organizers to do the same.
One of the keys to the app that we think makes it a winner for Realtors is that when you’ve met someone through the app, you have their contact information automatically which is extremely helpful.
MingleBird is a startup founded by four USC graduate students from the “Annenberg Program for Online Communities (APOC)” where rather than write a master’s thesis, they “APOC students conceptualize, build and launch a website featuring an online community.” We think this one is a homerun and built with more insight and quality coding than many apps on the market to date.
As event organizers, we’ll be giving it a try at our next event and encourage you to do the same, no matter the size of the mixer. What ways can you see for people to use MingleBird?
AGBeat is not affiliated with MingleBird.
