Are you a community manager and live in area with a number of other community managers & social media types?Β Would you like to see them more? Well lucky for you, there’s this handy new Community Manager Meetup.com page.
TheCommunityManager.com is looking for community managers in cities across America (and the world) to get together and do whatever you’d like to do.Β Have presentations by local businesses doing amazing things in social, have happy hours and tweet ups, schedule seminars, do case studies about your work and have others provide insight and in person, or anything that would enable you to take all of those amazing online relationships, offline. Meetups can be as frequent as you’d like them to be.Β Maybe once per month, or once per quarter – whatever works for your area.Β Bigger cities may have bigger populations of social media folk, but don’t count out small towns with dedicated people!
How to Get Started
Go to meetup.com/CM and search for your city.Β If it hasn’t been started already, then start one!Β Β For example, our friends in Los Angeles have already started their own #CmgrLA page (www.meetup.com/CM/CmgrLA), and have also created a Facebook group for all those in the area (if you’re in LA – Request to join here).
You’re more than welcome to continue the #Cmgr title for cities like #CmgrSF, #CmgrBoston, #CmgrDenver, etc.Β The names of the meetups would also serve as good Twitter hashtags surrounding your events, but that’s just our idea in order to be consistent across the US (..the world?).Β Feel free to get creative if you’d like!Β Β Own these events, they’re yours!
Are you international?Β We’d love to have you start this as well.Β I think a #CmgrIndia or #CmgrUKΒ sounds pretty awesome, and there’s no limit to what you can do.Β (Just remember to invite us Americans over from time to time!)
After you’ve had your meetup, write up a short re-cap of the event and post it on TheCommunityManager.com.Β For an example, take a look at #CmgrChi‘s most recent get together. Let others know what your group is doing, and cities across the country can share best practices and ideas.Β Maybe instead of happy hours, presentations, and speakers your group decided to go out and volunteer for a few hours on a Saturday.Β Β Meetups don’t have to be limited to professional development – they can be about building relationships in your own city and personal development as well. And most importantly – take pictures!Β Show off your community members!
As always, if you want any help getting started, feel free to contact us here at TheCommunityManager.com.Β We look forward to seeing what you come up!
Jenn is a Co-Founder of The Community Manager and the Editor-In-Chief. She’s also an adjunct professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. You can find her almost anywhere online, but specifically on #CmgrChat every Wednesday from 2-3pm ET.
Heck yea I’m ready to get #cmgrBoston off the ground.
Awesome Jenn! We have been meeting up in Boulder / Denver for a while but love the idea of extending to the larger community. Now when I travel I will have to look for meetups in other cities to check out. Oh and @JanetAronica Boston is on my list π
So excited for this. Remember guys, we want these meetups to be yours. You can make them what you want, while using TCM and our team to support and promote your communities. If we can build a network of smaller, local communities and tie them all together here at TCM, we’ll have something really powerful.
Rock on.
@Ruckus that’s awesome! If you guys have something that exists already, you should consider getting it integrated on the meetup everywhere community. You have a great head start, and by tying it to the larger cmgr community, everyone can benefit. Let me know if you have any thoughts.
We’re very excited to launch this feature, and look forward to orking with community managers across the country!
We’re very excited to launch this feature, and look forward to orking with community managers across the country!
@DavidSpinks Absolutely! With awesome speakers like @micah & the lovely gracekboyle we have lots we would love to share.
@Ruckus Awesome! Yea, lynnkoves tells me about the CMMeetup in Boulder, and I would LOVE for you guys to do what @DavidSpinks is saying and integrate — keep up what you’re doing on a bigger scale. I REALLY want to come to one in CO at some point soon π
This is cool, guys! Still need to poke around quite a bit, but I love what I’m seeing.
@JPedde thanks for the invite and mention π You really DO need to get out to CO. (again)
@Ruckus I’m planning to be at the next Boulder/Denver meetup. Hopefully see you before then around town. Did anyone from the Unreasonable Institute ever follow up with you?
Have a great weekend everyone!
So we already have multiple SF Bay Community Manager meetups – at last count there’s OCtribe, CLSWest monthly meetups, Silicon Valley First Thursday Community Meetup (or some name like that?), another meetup group just getting started, and Community Manager Breakfast. You can look at my Meetup profile to see all of them. Perhaps it would be best for y’all to reach out to the organizers of those meetups and ask them if they wish to share in your national community building efforts, before adding yet another one to the list?
@DavidSpinks @Ruckus @JPedde Woot! I did a little happy dance when I saw this. We’ve been sharing & showcasing such fantastic resources at our Boulder/Denver meetups — and we’ve all acknowledged that we wish we could share all the rich knowledge with the bigger community. We’ve also been thinking about creating a site for our group (still TBD :)). We’ll definitely get the meetups on Meetup Everywhere.
Thanks for everything YOU guys are doing! π
@musingvirtual Wow that’s a lot. Are they all completely independent or are they integrated some how?We’ll definitely want to reach out to them and see if we can get them involved. Maybe we could help all of them get on the same page as well.
Are you connected to those running these meetups? Perhaps you could get us in touch? That would be super helpful.
@DavidSpinks So they’re actually all totally independent and there is no integration. All of them are based on meetup.com. I’m sure there’s other more private meetups that aren’t meetup.com based or things that are based other places, but these are the five I know about.
The breakfast is Evan Hamilton of UserVoice (http://www.meetup.com/Community-Manager-Breakfast/), OCTribe is Susan Tenby & Evonne Heyning (http://www.meetup.com/octribe/), CLSWest is Erich Heberholz & Van Riper (http://www.meetup.com/clswest/), First Thursdays is Layla Sabourian who I don’t really know so well (http://www.meetup.com/First-Thursday-Silicon-Valley/), and this is the new one and I don’t know anyone there (http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Community-Managers/).
Great idea! Once I settle in Charleston, I might poke around and see if we can pull together a #cmgrChas. Based on my initial research, looks like their SMC is only sporadically active, and I didn’t see anything related to community management. But maybe once I start meeting people, it will pop out of the woodwork.
This is a really good idea to do right here. I am going to have to check out some here in Chicago and see what is going on.
I always love joining communities because you can meet different kind of persons and attitudes, that is so fun!