I've been pondering on the importance of face to face contact recently. I know we supposedly live in an ultra-connected world where everything is just a click of a button away, but if you simply believe blindly in this hype, I fear you will have a more difficult time.

A couple of weeks ago we were at the Next Web conference and even with out stomachs grumbling we decided we did not want to rush off to get lunch with everyone else as we were certain the hall would be packed. So we stayed behind to code (something we also found ourselves doing if one of the presentations seemed boring). I went to have a brief chat with the conference host, Erick Schonfeld. I was probably daydreaming during the introduction section as I had somehow missed his name and the fact that he was with TechCrunch. So yes, I had totally innocent intentions when walking up to him.

To cut the story short, at the end of that day we got back to the hotel to find a curious spike in our statistics. It appeared Erick had written about us on TechCrunch. That spinned off various other articles in other media. And no, our services did not crash or fold under the high load. No problem whatsoever.

So my basic point here is to talk to people. In the traditional way. No twitters or jaikus or IMs or anything. One mouth, two ears. Don't be obnoxious about it and pushy. In fact, you probably shouldn't even be thinking in that promotional manner, but just trying to get to know interesting people, partners and so forth. Nothing is more satisfactory than shaking someone's hand.

PS. You can view the TechCrunch article here.