A great way to maximize your networking opportunities at face-to-face events is to study the attendee list in advance and identify and research two or three people whom you’d like to meet.

While not all event organizers openly publish the names and affiliations of their registrants ahead of time, the ones that bring together the social media crowd often do. Take the registration pages for PodCamp Boston, WebInno, and my own Social Media Breakfast 7 as examples. If you scroll down on all of those pages, you’ll see who’s scheduled to attend, along with some combination of their company names, websites, blogs, and Twitter handles.

Now, do your homework: Select a few names from the list; follow their corresponding links; and learn more about what interests them, using their blog posts, tweets, about pages, and social networking profiles as guides. Then, once you arrive at the event, seek out those people on your must-meet list and use some of the information you’ve gleaned online as conversation starters.

Whether you’re a student looking to speak with an expert in your area(s) of interest or you’re a seasoned professional wanting to expand your personal network, you’ll always get much more out of the events where you make meaningful connections. Help your chances of making those connections happen by doing a bit online legwork ahead of time.

Social Media and Your Career is a series of posts on BryanPerson.com that covers how to use the tools and best practices of social media and social networking to jumpstart your professional life and/or raise your professional profile.

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