Event networking insights that are obvious to us, are often difficult to learn for a computer that just works in zero's and one's. Luckily, the Grip matchmaking engine has been able to learn some of those human subtleties completely on its own in 2017 by analyzing over 300,000 profiles and their behavior. The Grip matchmaking engine obtained these insights with limited human intervention through real-life interactions across Grip supported events last year. Below are some of those insights.
Obvious? Maybe. But our system now knows that people that have CEO, VP or Founder in their job title are 30% more likely to be connected with by people than others.In addition to that, people that have sales, marketing or other entry-level titles such as student or bar staff are going to have a tougher time making connections at most events while they’re actually more often power users.However, when someone is the “Head of Marketing” or a “Sales Manager” we learned that they’re actually more likely to be connected with than the event average.
What people write on their profile and what keywords are used seems to have a significant impact on their popularity in matchmaking. Words that significantly boost someone’s popularity include investment, investment manager, venture capital, investor, asset fund, big data, analytics, IOT, cloud computing, and startups. As one can expect, the investor related and tech buzzwords do have a significant positive impact on people’s popularity. Unpopular words include mainly sales, finance and traditional service provider related words including sales, marketing, management consultant, open source, law firm, banks credit, services bank, credit union.
One of the most striking things that our matchmaking engine has learned in 2017 is that why someone is recommended to them can have a larger impact than who is recommended to them.As you can see in the graph below, having a common connection or having swiped interested on a similar person can make you 3 to 4 times more likely to be interested in connecting with someone.The Grip Matchmaking Engine also detected that working in a similar industry has little impact on “interest” shown between users, while commonalities in connections (handshakes) and swipes had a greater influence.
Quite surprisingly, profile pictures do not have an impact on people’s chances of making connections. While aesthetically a professional photograph is good to have, there does not seem to be a correlation between photos and event matchmaking success. It really looks like people are interested in making the “right” connections - good news!
Since the matchmaking engine is self-learning it can sometimes learn from features that we don’t want it to learn from. Gender can be one of those features that our system doesn’t learn from but could actually have an impact on who people connect with. LinkedIn has often been accused of being used in the same way as tinder by men. Luckily, that’s not the case on Grip. Gender does not have an impact on the frequency someone’s profile was visited, nor increase chance of a connection on our platform.
As we’re ramping up for 2018, we are looking forward to continuing to apply our AI technology to learn about the event networking behaviour of professionals. The insights above, are just a small taste of the actionable insights that attendees and meeting organisers can use to optimise event experiences and actively participate in truly “smart” events. At Grip, we will continue to prove the value of this approach so stay tuned and if you’d like to hear more get in contact with our team.
