I didn't specify how exactly you should be achieving that so I'm assuming you assumed that I was assuming that networking is all about drawing attention.
Anyway I originally went entirely against your advice here and it worked for me. Mostly because my fellow computer science students hated initiating smalltalk and enjoyed a good story, so lifting this burden off them was good.
I guess what it shows is that neither of our approaches are guaranteed to work.
> try to be likable
You can't do that. But showing genuine interest in what people think and do, being a listener and not only a talker, is what gets many people to like you. And that's not something that's easy to fake. You have to be genuinely curious about other people's perspective and context.