The new new schmooze

Michelle Chihara crashes the cocktail parties that 'add value' for the Internet crowd

Outside, a Nor'easter is flooding Boston Common. Sheets of rain are sliding off the awnings on Boylston Street and turning the sidewalks into streams. The streets are deserted except for a steady trickle of people running for the shelter of one club, the Big Easy. Safe inside the coatroom, these brave souls shed parkas emblazoned with the names of their companies, don nametags, and are transformed. They reveal well-cut sweater ensembles, unstained blue button-down shirts, and tasteful leather bags. The guys shake out slightly spiky haircuts, the girls stomp water off of slightly funky shoes, and they all head inside to the monthly high-tech schmoozefest known as CyberBrew.

"This is the event, the sexy event," says Greg Hassell, the head Internet marketing director for CyberBrew's June sponsor, BizFon. He surveys the scene from his table in the corner and nods approvingly.

"Yeah, this is like the Academy Awards of the dot-com industry," says one of his salesmen. "This is the interactive community."

Perhaps. CyberBrew is, at the moment, Boston's biggest, hottest gathering of Internet professionals. But it's not alone. Like other burgeoning tech cities, Boston has developed a kind of party circuit for the dot-com crowd. CyberBrew has grown from 50 people in the basement of the Commonwealth Brewing Company in 1996 to a crowd of almost 700 people at the Big Easy in May. Two new regular schmoozes launched this spring. Between the networking nights, launch parties, and seminars, you can now schmooze every night of the week if you so choose.

Lately the digerati have been watching their personal worth fluctuate wildly and their employers merge, grow, and sometimes fold. The dot-com economy itself may be on shaky ground. But the dot-com schmooze market is nothing but bullish.

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Every industry has its trade conferences, but not every industry feels the need to party down with itself on a weekly basis. Only hot industries need to schmooze. The movie industry, for example, schmoozes. The ad industry schmoozes. The car-parts industry, it is safe to say, does not schmooze.

The Internet scene has special reasons to be schmooze-intensive. It's growing, for one. Tech companies can't hire people fast enough; they're the driving force behind efforts in Congress to grant more temporary visas to foreign technical workers. And the work force of each company is fluid: the turnover rate can be astronomical, and poaching is constant.

Despite the recent stock dip, the Internet is still changing the way we do business in this country. People working on the Net are making up the rules as they go along, and that means an industry that wants constant feedback about itself. Schmoozing means exchanging information, plus a heavy dose of mutual reinforcement. Thus the slew of trade publications, conferences, and, of course, alcohol-centric IdeaExchanges (yes, that's really the name of one local cocktail party). The promised reward is huge, the risk is bigger, and everyone is scrambling to keep up. One marketing partnership director for HookMedia told me his job is "to know everyone in Boston."

But, primarily, schmoozefests are proliferating because the Internet is hip. It is no longer boring to say you're going into business, as long as you're working for a dot-com or a management-consulting company with an online division. These are the new young mandarins, and like any aristocracy before them, they want to party.

One of the first people to exploit this impulse was Courtney Pulitzer (yes, related to the publishing family), a New York writer who has been covering the scene since 1995. In September 1998, she launched an invitation-only Manhattan soirée called Cocktails with Courtney, which now travels around the country. She also publishes a regular newsletter called CyberScene, and hosts CyberScene TV.

"The events sort of reflect the culture and attitude of different cities," says Pulitzer. "New York is very slick and competitive and trendy. Boston is a little more business-bankery, and for a while it didn't seem like there was a ton of parties."

That was then. Pulitzer brought one of her parties here in February and is now seeking a regular scenester correspondent in Boston for her newsletter. Meanwhile, CyberBrew has now outgrown its space six times.

Despite infusions of experienced management into some of the top layers, the Internet world is still mostly young, single, and high-income -- packed with people whose business cards read "vice-president" and "manager" and who graduated from college three years ago. For those who are young and powerful on paper, the schmoozefest is a place to see and be seen, a place to talk shop with people who grok the lingo, and a place to bask in the glow of being in the right place at the right time.

Collin Earnst, marketing manager for iXL, an Internet-services company, is a die-hard regular at CyberBrew. "It's moved from being just a place to connect with people for business to a real celebration of the culture," he says. "It's kind of neat."

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.