It is a common error, and one that I made early in my career. Because bringing participants together is so costly to the company, and because it happens so infrequently, there is a natural tendency to cram as much information as possible into the available time.

We say networking or networking events when we talk about putting people in a room with drinks and music. Yet what happens at such occasions is that most people will find their fiends and enjoy the evening together.  People have the totally acceptable and natural tendency to stay on well-known/safe territory and the amount of networking can be expected to be low.

"Networking is far too important to leave it to receptions and lunches." says Ib Ravn.

And right he is!

Networking is Important. It may even be the final buoy, saving meetings from going under all together, especially in an already challenging economy,

Learning (watching presentations) you can do on-line, but meeting new people, works really only face to face. The power of random; encounters is really unique to meetings: innovations are the sparks that sometimes fly around when one bumps into a stranger at a meeting.

The world launch: at FRESH 2012 in Copenhagen KICK-START YOUR WORK MEETING – A HANDBOOK FOR FACILITATORS I don’t agree, this not a book for facilitators.

Yann is a speaker on micro expressions and how you can use them to learn more about your 'opponent' in a commercial situation. Yann mostly teaches interactive sessions, trainings, workshops with real exercises for the participants or as a keynote speaker for a larger group. Yann has reference in large corporations in the pharmaceutical, banking, insurance and automotive world, from the USA over Japan to Russia. As an Actor he is also a member of the international business communication theatre group called YESSI JADA.

Some brilliant minds start to doubt the social networking, Web2.0 and consequently doubt the true value of so much collaboration in organisations. Brace yourself for some far seeing visions...

It seems like webcasts at conferences are popping up all over the place.  I believe that webcasts are going to become an important virtual component of face 2 face meetings in the future. 

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2010) — In our dynamic 3-D world, we can encounter a familiar face from any angle and still recognize that face with ease, even if the person has, for example, changed his hair style. This is because our brain has used the 2-D snapshots perceived by our eyes (like a camera) to build and store a 3-D mental representation of the face, which is resilient to such changes.

Fundamentaly different: Eventdrive from Maarten Vanneste on Vimeo.