On June 300, thousands of people attended Meetups around the world in celebration of Social Media Day. I coordinated an event with The Rainmaker Network and Unicorn Press, along with some of our sponsors like Girls in Tech, Choppe Choppe, and Social Media Club LA for a fantastic night out in Los Angeles. We had a successful event with a great turn out! I was able to network with some great people and learned a thing or 10 about social media along the way.
- Social networking does not mean online all the time: I love the commercial where the company is saying MySpace got social networking from them. It shows real people interacting face to face. People assume social networking requires a computer, when that's not the case! Social media bring people from all walks of life together in order to network socially.
- Dane Cook was a power user: One of the guys I met at the event had an intense conversation with me about power users, where he informed me that the comedian Dane Cook was also online for hours, doing as I do, which is how he garnered much of his success.
- Social media breeds egos: Some people were tooting their horns a bit much during Social Media Day, and not just at our event. In efforts to collaborate with a copy cat event that popped up after ours, I found that self entitlement does not get left in real life; it's portrayed online as well.
- People don't know how to tweet from their Blackberry: I was under the impression that Twitter was really popular partly because it's easy to use on your cell phone. I had to assist a guest in tweeting for our drawing from his Blackberry Pearl. My question was "are you at the right event?" Just kidding.
All in all, we still had a great time.