Those who are immersed in online networking might find it hard to remember that there’s also offline networking – you know, meeting actual people at an actual event?

Here are a few tips for making the most of an in-person networking event:

1. Be authentic – don’t adopt some kind of weird, not-the-real-you persona when you attend an in-person event. Just be yourself.

2. Be genuine – when you’re talking to someone, don’t constantly look over their shoulder to see if someone more interesting is approaching. Give your full attention to the person in front of you.

3. Find a legitimate reason to share your contact info – when talking to someone you haven’t met before, don’t assume they want your business card just because it’s a networking event. Think about how you can be of value to them, and offer your card after expressing that potential value.

4. Ask lots of questions – Making small talk can be agonizing, especially when it feels forced. Instead of the usual weather-related stuff, why not ask some leading questions of the person in front of you? What’s new in your industry? How has the recession impacted your business?

5. Become a resource - Write a short “nice to meet you” note to new people you meet and send it via email, and include a link to an online article that’s relevant to something you discussed with them.

Before Twitter, the best you could hope for waiting for word on a family member undergoing surgery was a couple of updates from the surgical team. Now, assuming your loved one’s having surgery in a Twitter-savvy hospital, you can get a real-time play-by-play of the procedure.  An Associated Press report about a Cedar Rapids woman whose family followed her procedure via Twitter states that more than 300 tweets were sent over the course of the three-hour surgical procedure.

While I think this is a great use of Twitter – family members said it was better than “sitting and not knowing in the waiting room” – I do wonder what would’ve happened if something had gone wrong during the procedure. Would the surgical team keep tweeting? Or, in the interest of protecting the patient’s privacy, would they have come out to update the family in person?

Twitter’s potential as a real-time news feed has been well-documented, from the shootings at Virginia Tech to tracking California wildfires.  However, I think there is still the potential to become too focused on the technology and lose the human side of communication. I’d hope, that if I’m one day sitting in a surgical waiting room, I don’t find out my loved one has died by reading it on Twitter.

Interesting phenomenon that can only happen on Twitter. Bob Barker was a “trending topic” on Twitter today – meaning he was one of the most-often tweeted topics of the day – because he hosted a television program called WWE Raw. (The wisdom of that has yet to be determined.) Then later, he was STILL a trending topic because so many people thought he had died because they could see he had trended – so they’d log into Twitter and search for his name, only to learn that he wasn’t dead, he was just on television, and then they’d tweet about it. I’m now curious to see how long this will continue, and I’m naming this Twitter phenomenon “Barkering” – as in, “to Barker.”  If you Barker on Twitter, it means you trended, and so many people thought you died because you trended that they continued to tweet about you, which kept you trending in a continuous loop.