Attending Local Tech Events for Fun and Profit
February 24, 2009 :: Joe LoongAs I’ve no doubt gracelessly hammered the point time and time again in this blog, I’m a pretty strong believer in the power of networking and participating in your local social media community– specifically, hanging around people who understand and use social media better than you, so you can figure out ways to adapt it for yourself and your business.
But don’t get me wrong — there’s plenty of social benefits that go along with… socializing. So I wanted to just do some quick capsule reviews for some events here in the DC Metro area that I’ve been to this past week (and that are coming up this week), to show some examples of different types of events that may be available (or that you can start) in your area.
To apply a little structure, I’ll call back to Ross Karchner’s map of the DC Tech Community (I mentioned it in more detail back in December), which is a pretty fair representation of what goes on hereabouts. (I tend to stay in the lower two-thirds of the grid, as opposed to the more technical and developer focused upper regions):
* Washington Blogger Meetup Group: February 18 was this group’s monthly meetup, which you can see on the grid in the lower right quadrant. The group’s goal is primarily social, though there is some knowledge exchange — discussion of blogging tools, swapping technical tips, etc. (As opposed to the periodic DC Blogger Happy Hours, which are more ad hoc and pretty much purely social — we also had a recent example this week.)
If you’re tied into your local blogger community, this type of group would probably the easiest to start.
* Bloggers for Good: The kickoff event for this group was February 19, at a restaurant in Sterling, Virginia. The goal was to get bloggers and blog fans together, for some socialization with the purpose of directing donations to a local charity. It worked pretty well, using a combination of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and good old-fashioned working of the contacts to get the word out.
I would put it in the lower-right map quadrant — while there is some networking, it’s primarily bringing people together around a mutual interest (a cause or general philanthropic principal, in this case).
On a geographical note, the organizers are looking to do more of these and expand to other areas. And Sterling is an outer suburb of DC, so it’s an example of how you can mobilize activity outside of city centers. (It does help that there are still a lot of tech companies out in this area.)
* One-Offs: We also saw a couple of anniversary one-offs — a birthday party for Wired’s Danger Room blog (lots of defense types in the DC-area, of course), and the DC whistlestop for the 10th anniversary of social linksharing site Fark.com. While one-offs from the DC tech scene proper, they both relied on active constituencies in this local area. And of course, an anniversary is a great excuse to throw a get-together.
Looking to this week, we’ve got:
* Tuesday, 2/24: Social Happy Digital Hour, another inaugural social and networking event for Northern Virginia suburban social media types, (call it lower-left quadrant of the map) organized by Maya Ruiz-McPherson (who’s worked Network Solutions for past events). Again, as long as you can come up with names of interested folks in your area, throw them together and see what happen — maybe you can get a semi-regular thing going.
* Wednesday, 2/25: RefreshDC Monthly Meeting: This one is in the upper-right quadrant; slightly more technical, and a regular meeting of designers, Web professionals, and assorted hangers-on.
* Thursday, 2/26: TechCocktail DC 4: Another lower-left quadrant networking event, on the high-end (with sponsors and such – founder Eric and Frank put on a good event, and they’ve done it in numerous cities, numerous times).
Depending on where you are, you might not be fortunate enough to be able to find an interesting event every night of the week (or, if you’re like most people, you probably couldn’t find the time to do them all).
And of course, this is just a snapshot of stuff going on in the DC area, to illustrate things you could be doing. Notable by their absence are upper-left quadrant events — highly tech-centric networking events are not generally my bag. (For more stuff, check out DCTechEvents.com and Gary’s Guide, among others.)
Anyway, I’m curious to know if any of this events-pimping stuff is useful to folks, either to help people in the DC metro area find out about social media events, or to inspire other folks to find or start their own social media networking events (especially with a small business flavor). So please leave a comment and let me know what’s what.
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