What happens at a tweetup & why: a Charlotte tweetup review
This past Saturday while in Charlotte, NC for some video blogging training at Lode Stone Digital (@josecav) we held a Charlotte Tweetup at Panera Bread on Tryon Street. In attendance was @capitalfellow, @UpsideUp and myself (@waynesutton) The meetup was organized via twitter, Social Carolina site and yahoo’s upcoming service. I must say I was disappointed with the turnout especially since Charlotte has been tweeted more than any other city in North Carolina.
Last week before the tweetup @capitalfellow suggested moving the location for a bigger turn out, because like in the Triangle area location plays a role for local participation but also I think we needed more PR, and I should have partnered with more local Charlotte twitter users to help spread the word.
Although the turnout was small, the conversations was far from being a let down. @capitalfellow aka Scott who works in the IT department at UNC-Charlotte and @UpsideUp aka Laurie who’s a graphic designer and co-founder of new startup site http://sk-rt.com labeled as the ‘women’s digg site’ and I talked about everything from graphic design, SEO, Charlotte twitter users and the hangout locations for Charlotte’s tech social crowd. Most of the conversation was suggestions and feedback for @UpsideUp sk*rt website as they work on version 2, to be launched soon. She mentioned how it’s bootstrapped with her partners in New York and Texas, and when the site was digged. The site uses pligg and is about to launch version 2 soon with a more social and personal appeal but the conversation lead to how can sk-rt increase traffic, grow it’s online and offline communities around women topics in each of the partners location, establish partnerships with other women networks TV and online. @capitalfellow and I suggested using sk-rt’s facebook group more, buying some facebook geotagged ads, create facebook fan page and possibly use Ning to organized local meetups in Charlotte, NY and Texas. You may ask why all the facebook suggestions? Well it’s because sk-rt knows that facebook has the audience it wants to reach to sustain it’s growth in the future.
Before @UpsideUp had to leave for mom duty the conversation change to exchanging twitter friends user names like they were business cards. Then @capitalfellow and I wrapped up the tweetup by talking about how the Charlotte Observer @theobserver and Raleigh News and Observer @newsobserver uses twitter. It seems that the Charlotte Observer is trying to have a little more online interactivity but still it’s a one way post to twitter and not a lot of conversation. All this was done from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and time flew by and this brings me to why have a tweetup? For this I must quote my friend Anton Zuiker who said: “for online community building every effort to gather people and build a community online should result in an offline face to face conversation or face to face event.” and that’s what’s makes tweetups valuable, the face to face conversations with people of common interest who feel as though they know each other already by the previous conversations that has already taken place on twitter. Once those face to face meetups happen then the discussion leads to opportunities and relationships; tweetups are like mini-unconference.
Even though I’m in Raleigh, hopefully a few of my Charlotte twitter friends, @jruckman, @rosebeezy , ironfroggy, @ciordia9 along with @capitalfellow, @UpsideUp will continue have more Charlotte tweetups in the future. Upcoming tweetups are planned in the Triangle, we have over 28 people currently voting on the date, and we’re working on the location also.
Details to be announced soon but we’re almost 100% confirmed for March 6th for the Triangle Tweetup. So get ready for the next mini-unconference aka Tweetup.
