When meet-ups pay off

The best professional exchanges I’ve had at networking events weren’t planned. Someone mentions a story they’re working on, someone else pipes up because they have a contact, then a third person has the perfect client to comment. Within 10 minutes, two problems are solved and nobody has handed over a media kit.

Earlier this month, at a Desert Prose meet-up I hosted for writers and PRs in Dubai, exactly this happened. I’d been stuck on a piece for weeks – right story, wrong contacts. Two PRs at the event filled the gap. I got the quotes I needed, their clients appeared in something that was actually relevant to them and the whole thing came together in a single conversation that started with something else entirely.

This is what in-person networking can do when it’s allowed to work properly. It’s also why the slower months – the ones that feel like the wrong time to leave your desk – are precisely when showing up pays off. When things get quiet professionally, the instinct is to send more pitches and chase more leads. But the contacts worth having don’t necessarily materialise in response to a pitch. They come from being in the room consistently enough that, when something useful crosses paths with something you need, you’re already there. Right place, right time.

The flip side is equally true, though. I’ve also been to events where I’ve been cornered within minutes by someone who has clearly arrived with a list of journalists to work through and a brief to fill before the end of the quarter. It has the opposite of the intended effect. I feel inundated and don’t remember a thing I’ve been told.

If you show up with genuine interest in the people there, rather than a plan to extract something from them, you can get results. Follow up when there’s a real reason – a connection that makes sense, a story that relates to what they mentioned. Don’t mistake access for opportunity, because being in the same room as a journalist is not the same as having a pitch meeting.

We all know industry relationships take time, and they don’t survive being rushed. But they do compound when they’re built on actual exchanges rather than transactional ones. And the slow months, counterintuitively, are when that investment makes the most sense. You have more time, the rooms are smaller, and the conversations tend to go further. So, what’s in the diary?