I remem­ber hun­grily search­ing for a group of like minded women when I was in col­lege. A pro­fes­sor men­tioned the pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion Women in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and I wrote it down. I couldn’t wait to get home to check it out. I went home after class and looked in the phone book and called.

I did what? Yeah, it was a long time ago and there was no Face­book Fan Page.

I called and spoke with the Philly chap­ter pres­i­dent who told me there were stu­dent mem­ber­ships and I was wel­come to come to a meet­ing. I not only went to a meet­ing, I thrived in that group, became the minor­ity chair­per­son (we didn’t have minor­ity mem­bers so I volunteered) and went on to orga­nize the first sem­i­nar in the City on mar­ket­ing to His­pan­ics. We had to walk 3 miles in the snow to get to that meet­ing (J/K).

I don’t think we used the word net­work­ing at that time yet but it’s what we did. We had meet­ings at which we orga­nized events at which we social­ized after the speak­ers spoke and exchanged busi­ness cards. It’s com­ing back now, they were busi­ness card exchanges. You could read about other peo­ple in other chap­ters in the newslet­ter that came out quar­terly. If you were able to afford it or the com­pany you worked for would pay for it (not likely) you could go to a con­fer­ence and actu­ally meet other mem­bers. Oth­er­wise, you kind of just existed in a silo guess­ing what oth­ers were doing across the coun­try and wait­ing for indus­try mag­a­zines to come out every month, unless you were a big let­ter writer with pen pals.

Today I’m tick­led pink that I can go on over to Recruit­ing­blogs to see what the Top 100 Influ­encers are up to, hop into a chat and com­ment on the opin­ions of my col­leagues. I’m as pleased as punch to be able to board the infor­ma­tion auto­bahn Twit­ter, where the col­lec­tive con­science of peo­ple I fol­low, because I want to hear what they have to say, teach me more in one day than I ever learned at the U.

It’s now pos­si­ble to meet any­one you want with­out pay­ing the long dis­tance call or the air­line ticket. Even as a con­firmed intro­vert I’m not sug­gest­ing you shouldn’t talk to peo­ple in per­son. There’s no way I would ever be able to know most of the incred­i­ble peo­ple I have been able to meet through social networking.

We throw zingers across con­ti­nents, exchange ideas in chat boxes, read each other’s arti­cles as soon as the pub­lish but­ton is clicked and gather vir­tu­ally at webi­nars and in each other’s feeds.

You’re here, and I know I’m prob­a­bly preach­ing to the choir but I just have to say it. I love my global band of broth­ers & sisters.

I might even be con­vinced by Jerry Albright to go meet some of them in per­son at Recruit­Fest 09!