I can imagine fewer more terrifying social experiments than what I signed up for last night. Blitz Time is a service for "speed networking" that sets participants up in a series of short, one-on-one phone calls with other people. Surprisingly, once I began, it was not nearly as scary as it was fun. That is saying a lot for me, a guy who is afraid to order pizza on the phone...

Follow up:

I learned of Blitz Time through my research on LinkedIn for background on another company I had seen a Startuply job posting for Lead Technologist. When I searched LinkedIn, I found one of their founders, Jeff D'Urso, was an MIT Sloan undergrad alum like me. The job there is more for an uber-developer that I am not (e.g. Mike Buhkin, Dean Ebesu, or Jay Walters), but I noticed Jeff was also involved with this intriguing company, Blitz Time.

At Blitz Time, members create a profile, similar to LinkedIn, then register for phone networking events. These can range from an Executive Round table series every Friday morning at 8am, to the Social Media Discussion I attended last night. When the event started, I called into the Blitz Time phone number, listened to featured speaker David Alston, from Radian6, who spoke about social media monitoring, then was launched into a series of conversations.

As I connected with each person on the phone, their profile information was displayed on my web browser, so I could quickly see who I was talking with. A timer in the top right counted down my 5-8 minute window of opportunity. And the two of us...talked.

It's like a cocktail party from home and without the difficult "how do I break into this conversation?" and "how do I move on?" moments. But yes, it can be challenging. How do you quickly make a phone connection with someone you have never met before? How do you communicate who you are and get your point across without "holding forth" too much? How do you listen and draw the other person out when you have nothing to go on except for this profile information you are reading from the screen of your web browser?

Afterwords, you can go back and access the profiles of people you talked with and send them emails to further connect. In what seemed like terribly short span of time, I met some very interesting people including Giselle Conyette, a writer and blogger from Canada, Aliza Sherman, Cybergrrl and internet pioneer who is moving to the remote town of Tok, AK from where she works virtually all over the world, and restaurateur Justin Levy, who is using social media to connect with his customers at his Northampton, MA Argentinean Steakhouse.

I definitely need to follow up with Andrew Rohman, whose web design company Neptune Web is located nearby in Somerville, MA. And I hope I gave Beth Bridges, from the Clovis, CA Chamber of Commerce, some ideas on how a blog like my WestwoodBlog, could benefit a community.

The other people I spoke with (wow, 10 people!) were all interesting and our only real challenge was dealing with the short time frame. I wished I could hit a button to request more time or simply that we had a couple more minutes. At times, I did feel like I was "holding forth" too much or that I garbled and minimized my "brand." No, I pretty much bungled that in many cases as I struggled to describe who I was in a short pitch. It is the same challenge in real life, but on Blitz Time, you don't have the distractions of a real life meeting, you are more focused and comfortable at home than standing in front of someone in a busy room of people, and you automatically get the business card exchange, along with a profile including links to everything the person does.

I think Blitz Time can be a useful "tool" in the networking arsenal. Clearly, it appeals to "power networkers," but it was surprisingly accessible for a phone phobic like me. It is like twitter in that it is a great potential leveler of access--you get your 5 minutes that might be very hard to get otherwise. You risk coming across as a bozo...but that kind of risk can help you grow and probably become better and more confident in real world interactions. I highly recommend people check out this service and attend one of the upcoming events.