I’m terrible at looking at someone’s face and remembering their name. I admitted as much on the latest episode of The AI Social Playbook, and anyone who has stood next to me at a conference has seen it. Most of us cope the same way. We glance at the name badge, hope the lanyard hasn’t flipped around, and fake our way through the first thirty seconds.
At a conference with thousands of attendees, that’s the whole game. You can’t meet everyone, so the people you do meet are mostly an accident. Whoever happened to be in line with you, whoever sat at your table. You leave with a stack of new connections on LinkedIn and, a week later, can’t remember which of them you meant to follow up with.
Judi Fox showed me a better way on that episode, and it takes less than an hour of homework. She built what she calls a room for an event the night before we recorded. When she walked in, she already knew who she wanted to talk to, what they looked like, and what they did for a living.
Where the guest list was hiding
The event was RVA Showcase Night in Richmond, Virginia. Before it happened, someone named Crystal had posted about it on LinkedIn. Judi looked at who had liked and commented on that post and recognized it for what it was: a list of people who cared enough about the event to raise their hand in public. Some of them would be in the room that night.
Almost every event has a post like this. The organizer’s announcement. A speaker sharing their session. A sponsor saying they’ll be at booth 12. The engagement on those posts is the closest thing you’ll get to an attendee list, and nobody is hiding it from you.
Building the room, step by step
Judi built a small app for this with Claude, a Google Sheet and her Squarespace site. You don’t need the app to use the method. It breaks down into six steps.
Step 1: Pick one or two source posts
Find the posts with the most relevant engagement. For a local event, the organizer’s announcement is usually enough. For a big conference, use a speaker or session you plan to attend, because those engagers share your interests and not just the venue. You’re looking for a list of 20 to 29 people, not 300.
Step 2: Turn the engagement into a list
This is where AI helps. Judi described it simply on the show: she can use AI to grab the post and help her make a list of who should be in the room. Copy the names and headlines from the post’s reactions and comments, paste them into Claude or whichever chat tool you use, and ask for a clean table with each person’s name, title and company. Ask it to flag anyone whose company looks irrelevant to you, so you can cut them.
Step 3: Check every profile yourself
This is the step you’ll be tempted to skip, and it’s the one that matters most. Judi tried letting AI find each person’s LinkedIn profile. It got some of them wrong – the right name at the wrong company. So her admin page requires a human to paste the correct profile URL before anyone gets added to a room.
I’ve hit the same wall. When I ask Claude to research people I want to reach out to, it finds the right person maybe 60% of the time. That’s useful for drafting a list. It is not good enough for walking up to someone and calling them by the wrong job title. Open each profile, confirm the face and the company, and copy the URL yourself.
Step 4: Put it on your phone
Judi’s rooms live on her phone, and that turned out to be the whole point. Each room shows the members’ photos, and one tap opens a LinkedIn feed of only their posts. Without her app, a Google Sheet with names, titles, and profile links does the job, and it opens in the Sheets app on your phone. What matters is that you can pull it up in five seconds while you’re standing in the doorway.
One limitation worth knowing if you try to build the combined feed yourself. Judi’s room feed is a single link with every member baked into it, and past about 29 people, the URL gets too long and breaks. That’s why her rooms have 29 seats. She also didn’t show the Claude side of her build on the episode, so I can’t tell you which prompts got her there.
Step 5: Scroll it on the way in
Judi described the moment it paid off. She was scrolling the room on her phone as she walked in, which looked like she was just checking her phone. Then she walked up to Claudine, already knowing who she was and that she was the office manager. She told me she’d never been able to do that before, because she’d never had anything on her phone that showed her who was going to be in the room.
That’s the difference between “nice to meet you” and “you’re the office manager over at…”. The second one makes people feel seen, and that’s how a conversation actually starts.
Step 6: Keep the room after the event
Most of us lose the thread the moment we get home. Judi’s room keeps working. The next day she opened Crystal’s feed and found her recap of the night, complete with photos of the people Judi had just met. Then she opened the full room and scrolled every post from all 23 people at once.
This is where the follow-up happens, and Judi is firm on one rule: don’t let AI write your comments. AI comments repeat the post back and add nothing. Her example: “Wow, Mike, that was so insightful. Thank you so much for sharing that.” Nothing in it came from her. You just met these people. Write like it.
Why this works when the name badge doesn’t
Judi made another point on the show that changed how I think about networking. Commenting only on the posts of the one person you want to work with looks thirsty. Showing up in their circle – on posts from the people they already know and trust – keeps your name in front of them without you ever pitching. An event room is that circle, gathered in one place, on one night.
If you want to see her rooms on screen, including the admin page and the RVA Showcase Night room itself, the full episode and breakdown are here.
The homework got cheap
Pre-event research isn’t new. Good salespeople have always looked people up before a big meeting. What changed is the cost. Judi built a room of 23 people in under an hour, right before she left for the event.
She also put her finger on the thing to protect. AI, she said, can accidentally create micro-disappointments of trust. The wrong name. The comment that clearly wasn’t written by you. Use the AI to find the people and organize the list. Then shake hands, check the profiles, and write the comments yourself.
Your next event almost certainly has a post about it already. Start with the people who liked it.
