Seattle Tweet-ups

Over the last 24 hours, I've attended two excellent local tweet-ups.  Unlike the usual social events, these tweet-ups were more than social, they were cause-oriented.  Last night I attended The Pitch, an awesome meeting devoted to Thoughts on the future of publishing organized by Jason Preston. About 20 people debated the viability of the newspaper in today's wired world.  Kathy Gill pointed out the importance of newspapers to community and the fact that technologies like electronic ink will make newspapers viable for a long time. As Kathy said, "newspapers are going to stick around longer than the early adopter geeks think."  Journalist Monica Guzman stated "the internet is doing wonderful things for journalism. We'd be busting out the party hats if we could afford them". She felt that it may not be worth the effort to find a business model that supports a daily.  At the end of the night, we voted 13-4 that print daily newspapers would not exist 25 years from now. You can read the rest of the tweets here.

Early this morning, I attended a different kind of tweet-up organized by likemind. Likemind is an organization which plans meetups all around the world on the same day.  The topics may differ, but the date is always the same.  likemind Seattle is organized by Jason Gingold, an online advertising strategist. This morning was a light crowd, but it turns out that each of us had worked in the account planning/strategy world and had a NY background. Small world, go figure. Given the composition of the audience, then it should be no surprise that we talked about the social webs and energizing community for politics.  And the always witty, Tim Frommer kept us laughing and thinking.  likemind Seattle will put together a survey for the discussion topic of the next meeting, so follow him to learn about it in advance.

Seattle Breakfast with Jeff Pulver

Tweetups can take incredibly different forms from intimate 1:1’s for coffee to big parties like in Boston on Monday night after MarketingProfs B2B event as chronicled by Amanda Gravel and at all different hours. Seattle’s Twitterati had a Social Media Breakfast with Jeff Pulver this morning. Jeff Pulver’s social media breakfasts are not the usual business networking affairs. He seeks to apply Facebook concepts of tagging, the wall, and pokes to the face to face world using labels, and post it notes. Interesting concept and great icebreakers. For example, Amanda Wolfman’s status tag line was “Even my yarn belongs to a social network.” Carter Rabasa’s Flickr photos demonstrate the art of low-tech walls and tagging. Jeff Pulver’s breakfast are well known for the networking, and a unique approach.

Also in attendance were Michael Markman, , Ken Camp , Eric Weaver , Tara Brown , Leigh Fatzinger, Teresa Valdez Klein, Robert Scoble, Eric Bento, Lacy Kemp and Brian Eisenberg .

Seattle’s social media community has a couple of other upcoming events, Bar Camp Seattle organized by Tara Brown and the Podcamp Seattle on June 21^st organized by Eric Weaver. I hope to see everyone there.

Tweetup

One of the unique things relevant to the Twitter community is the tweetup, a physical meeting of twitterers. Although the Twitter community is quite strong online, many people have felt that the bonds become even stronger when you meet someone face to face. Tweetups occur all the time, in fact there is a section on the Twitterpack PBwiki devoted to tweetups and there are a few tweetup specific accounts on twitter like TweetupNYC, Ottawa_tweetup.

Tweetups occur all the time, as you can imagine. Last week, there were two tweetups of significance. Erin Kotecki traveled to Kansas City from her Southern California home to visit family. Erin is a prolific tweeter with just under 3000 friends and followers, respectively. She has written over 14,000 tweets. Her KC fans and friends celebrated her visit with a prodigious tweetup. Zena Weist, another prolific tweeter, organized the event and captured it on her blog. Approximately 30 tweeters attended KC’s maiden tweetup.

The success of the event can be summarized by Zena’s tweet below.

Another special tweetup occurred in Boston. A tweetup celebration was held for Doug Haslam who was changing jobs. Doug is another prolific tweeter with well in excess of 3000 friends and followers. The party held at a local karaoke bar was quite festive as many of the revelers reported on twitter, utterz, and facebook.

The Boston Twitterati including Chris Brogan were all there.

Adam Zand does Borderline.