Social Media Day Tweetup In Syracuse
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 2, 2010
I’m glad I get to write about this event this time around because I’m going to embellish it somewhat. Oh, I’m going to tell the truth, but I get to add those little things about people that I’m not sure anyone else would add, in my own way. Just so y’all know, any links to names are people who were at the event; if you don’t get a prominent part in the tale, your names with your Twitter links will come at the end of this post.
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Wednesday was Social Media Day, at least in the United States; I have no idea if any other countries played along. It was named thus by Mashable, and as I read about different events in some newspapers across the country, a lot of people claimed it as a PR farce, while others tried to take the mantle of best attended. I’ll say this; ours was the best attended tweetup to date, and I bet we had as much fun, if not more fun, than those really large ones. I thought I had a hand in helping to plan the date, as I had been talking to a few people about trying to have one on a Wednesday so that people who hadn’t been able to make Tuesday or Thursday could come, but it seems that Kelly Lux and Dan Klamm put it together because they knew about the Mashable date; oh well… 
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This time the tweetup was held at a place called the Bull & Bear Pub in Hanover Square on East Water St. My little story about this is that, back in the 70′s, this area was where the pimps and prostitutes used to hang out. As a teenager, I’d come downtown either by myself or with a few friends and we’d park the car someplace safe and walk over to the area to watch. They even had pimps with feathers in their hats and those big Lincoln Continentals. These days the area is definitely a bit more family friendly with the fountain running, and lots of bars and a restaurant or two, with a new one coming; I’ll get back to that.
I showed up right at 5:30, which means I got to park right across the street; love that! The first person I ran into was my buddy Josh Shear, who’s just started his own web design business called That Josh on websites, SEO and social media; yup, another competitor in the field. lol I also saw another friend of mine, Sean Branagan, who owns a company called Communigration, a national marketing company, who was buying the first round of drinks. That took care of my first diet soda. He introduced me to someone else, and I hate to say this but I can’t remember who; sorry about that. 
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I next met Joanne Capella, who’s doing something up at Syracuse University that I can’t remember, but I do remember that she and her husband are big into arts and crafts, as she told me there’s a big community in Syracuse that does that. Will wonders never cease. While we were talking my friend Tim Dodge showed up. He and I have known each other almost 7 years now, as we met as part of this writer’s group I’m a part of, and he’s a great writer as far as I’m concerned. Check out his site to see some of his writings, and I believe it will link to some of his recorded books as well.
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From this point people started coming in droves, so much so that I can’t think of who came in and in what order. But there are a few people I’d like to highlight, if I may. One was Scott Severance, who owns his own real estate company, and used to ask me to sit in for him at BNI meetings whenever he couldn’t show up. Two others are my friends Kelvin Ringold, who’s a master photographer and getting serious about motivational presentations, and Jill Hurst-Wahl, who travels around the country talking about library sciences, research, digitization and social media stuff.
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There was also my friend Steve Borek, who’s into life and personal coaching, and a new friend, Danita Becker, who does web design and promises she’s got a blog coming at some point. And of course, one of my best friends in history, Scott Thomas, who I’ve talked about a lot around here because he’s a man of many talents, including his photography blog, and someone who comments here regularly (and picks on me as well), brought his camera, and is responsible for all the pictures you see here.
Some of what I know about other people who showed up and deserve special mentions include:
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Nicole and Kevin Samolis, who put together the wildly successful Syracuse Biz Buzz conference, which I helped work on the night before and is where I met Anthony Rotolo, a professor at Syracuse University who gave a brief presentation that night, and Jenn Pedde, who was one of the people helping new folks set up accounts, which is how I participated.
Anne Messenger is one of the most prominent local entrepreneurs in the area, and I have a feeling she has no real idea who I am, even though I was in two presentations she gave and of course gave my opinion when I felt I wanted to participate (I’m known for that). She does career management & HR consulting.
Todd Engel, one of the few attorneys I know (which includes the attorney who put the will together for my wife and I, who regularly seems to have my number when I go to the casino to play poker).
Kim Brown, who many other folks knew and is a stone cold fox (see, us married men get away with stuff like that when our wives are cool) who works for WSYR Channel 9.
Rebecca Kohler, the only physician who showed up, and strangely enough, is a sleep doctor (seems a lot of people remembered I was having a sleep study done, but didn’t realize it was last week and not this week), and we talked for awhile about sleep and such.
Those are the folks I got to talk to or knew already fairly well who showed up. Everyone else I got to meet but didn’t get to talk to, and by the time I remembered I’d brought pad and pen with me to get names were still around do I could get the info. Here’s everyone else who I hope continue coming to our “little” tweetups:
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Lisa Baker;
Sally Swartley;
Martha Ketcham (who I’m really proud of because she didn’t have a Twitter account at the event but said she was going home and setting up one with this link, and she did);
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At this point you probably think this post is over, but it’s not. Remember I mentioned a new restaurant coming. Dan Klamm’s father is opening a new restaurant on that same block at the corner of East Water and Salina called Prime Steakhouse (no real website here yet, but it’s coming, and we got to take a tour of it. I have no idea what it used to be, but you could tell that it was something fancy at some point in history, and some of the woodwork and the design is classic. There were even a couple of rooms where Scott and I talked about hiding bodies; I’m not kidding. lol It looks like it’s going to be fantastic, and, well, y’all know how I like my meat (well, love meat, but don’t like it fighting back when I’m ready to eat). I can hardly wait.
And now it’s over; whew! By the way, the young lady working the bar at Bull & Bear was extremely attractive and friendly as well; even finally showed me a menu, though Scott had already mentioned Friendly’s by then, so if you ever want a great burger and fries, it seems to be a great place to go for one.
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Anyway, that’s all I can remember. This is what a tweetup is supposed to be; lots of fun, meeting new friends and catching up with old friends, and hopefully being a positive experience for everyone. I even got to talk a little bit about the social media marketing event I’m putting on come June 22nd. I had a blast; can’t wait until the next one. And for those of you living in other parts of the world, I heartily recommend going to one of these, even if you have to set it up yourself.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2012 Mitch Mitchell
Disappointed In Ning
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 11, 2010
Back in 2008, I wrote a post based on a complaint an acquaintance of mine had with LinkedIn. At that time, he was very active on LinkedIn, and he’d had enough of some of the bureaucratic stuff he was putting up with after all the time and energy he’d put into the group, for free no less.
At the time he hadn’t decided where he was going to go, but he eventually ended up on Ning. Ning allows people to create their own social or business communities and networks or join other communities already established.
Truthfully, when you first go there it doesn’t look like much. I don’t even know how you’d go about finding communities you’d want to join. In my case, I was invited to join his community, which I did because I had belonged to his community on both LinkedIn and on YahooGroups, which we all know is gone now. He started with one group within his community, then expanded it into many areas. He also got a lot of people to join, which shows how good he is as a networker.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that I just don’t get Ning at all. For all the things my friend has tried to do, there’s almost never been any real conversation that’s taken place. I’ve tried starting topics, only to have them die upon arrival. Frankly, I had hoped that it might be the thing to take the place of Ryze, which seemed to be in decline, but I can’t honestly say it’s done that for me. I’ve become more disenchanted with the one or two line messages that pop up from time to time, often seeming to be hawking some event or product rather than attempting to create a community of conversation.
Yeah, I know, it almost sounds like some of the rants against Facebook here and there, but at least Facebook is entertaining, if one wishes to be entertained. And Facebook is really easy to use; I just think that Ning is too minimalistic in some ways to be really viable for the masses. Also, what is the real purpose of Ning? Is it a business networking site, a social networking site… I don’t really know.
So, I’ve gone in and left every group I was a part of. I didn’t cancel my account, and I’m not sure why I haven’t canceled my account. Maybe I’m still hoping that someone or something will spark an interest and a real community that I can be a part of. It’s not going to be me, since I have my blogs and other outlets to take care of. I guess we’ll see where it all goes.
Anyone else have thoughts about Ning they’d like to share?
New LinkedIn Applications
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 28, 2008
Are you a member of LinkedIn? I am, and you can find my profile here. I have to say that I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for years, and though I haven’t gotten all that much use out of it, and even wrote about it once, I have met a few people in person with whom I contacted first through them, and it does offer me the opportunity to list my business and I actually have a good number of referrals and recommendations from people I’ve either worked with or belong to groups with.
Back in November, LinkedIn started adding some applications to the mix, trying to give its subscribers a chance to become a bit more social than in the past. I finally had an opportunity to check out some of these applications, and I’ve even found one or two that I’ve decided to hook on to.
The one that means the most to me is what they call “Blog Link“, which gives you the opportunity to not only link your blog to LinkedIn, but it also will give up updates on those people you’re connected to who have recently blogged. I added that one, and it automatically went out and found my business blog, as that’s the one associated with my site, and now people who visit me have the option of clicking on the application listed in my sidebar and going to see what kinds of things I’m writing there.
Another application that some folks might like is tied into blogging also, but it’s tied into those blogs that are hosted on the WordPress.com blog site. It’s actually just called “WordPress“, which makes it pretty easy to identify. However, it’s not for folks who use WordPress software, so don’t get fooled.
Another one that’s pretty good, but I decided not to load, is called “Company Buzz“, and it basically looks through Twitter to see if people are talking about your company, and if so it posts those quips on your site. My thought, however, is that it probably looks for your Twitter posts and puts them on your site also, and if you’re not only talking about business then you could look somewhat goofy in some of the posts it might put up for you. No, I don’t quite need that happening.
The only other application that I find somewhat intriguing, that I’ll have to think about, is called “Polls“, and I’m thinking that’s pretty self explanatory. However, it’s geared only towards other members of LinkedIn, and only those people who are connected to you in some fashion. So, it might be interesting, but since its scope is limited I’m thinking that it’s results wouldn’t necessarily be indicative of the population as a whole. Though you can’t use it on LinkedIn, I’m thinking that if you could use a poll like the type John Dilbeck talked about that it would work out better for you in the long run.
I have to say that, overall, I’m impressed with changes that LinkedIn is finally starting to make. Along with the applications I mentioned there are 5 others right now. This comes on the heels of their finally allowing images and working on promoting different types of groups on their site, as I’ve recently (okay, over a month ago) joined their speakers group and their SEO group, although the SEO group has only had one discussion item thus far, and I started it; no comments back yet. Still, they’re finally trying to make it a place where professionals can at least talk to each other, which is a far cry from what it’s been for years, and why I hadn’t given it much value before.
If you’re a business person, I feel I can now say that you at least need to be listed on LinkedIn in some fashion. Check it out when you have a chance.
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