Mary has been a long time guest at SXSW for a number of years. One of the reasons she wanted to present at SXSW is because she works at a small business and it would help. She thought it would make for an interesting panel that would be unique and different than the other panels.

The summary catches you right off the back with “12 Weeks and 60 meetings. Starting with 5 people from different industries whom I already knew, I asked each of them to introduce me to the most interesting person they know in NYC, and each of those people to do the same, for 12 weeks, resulting in 60 documented meetings.”

I thought this was amazing. To be able to have conversations with people from different backgrounds with the end result being priceless. Mary calls the meetings “business blind dates,” which is rather appropriate if you think about it.

“It was actually a lot of fun. I think the number one thing people said when they saw the project was that they wanted to do some version of teh project themselves,” Mary said. “It’s kind of always been my goal to create some technology version that allows somebody to emulate some kind of aspect of it.”

Mary likes meeting people, so she wanted to see how far her connections went. “I started with people from different industries like fashion, food, advertising, fitness and music and none of them knew each other,” said Mary.

It was a lot more intense than what she imagined, but that it was alot of fun. One interesting part to Mary’s story was when she said, “I met one guy that knew about every other person I had met, yet it was my first time meeting him.”

Mary described Converstion Dominoes as a fun experiment to follow the path of introductions. One result was that people were introducing her to people that they found interesting, but were more of an acquaintence, rather than a close friend of theirs.

The questions to be answered at the panel are:
1. Why should I expand my network and meet people outside my industry?
2. What were the most fascinating learnings from this experiment?
3. How could someone replicate this project for their own business networking?
4. How small is this world?
5. What’s the best way to self promote a project like this?

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