Today’s Raleigh News & Observer features an article about the upcoming NC State Fair and the Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup that my business partners and I helped organize.

Even if you don’t play the plastic guitar or send text messages to your BFFs, you’ll be welcome at the first Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup, an event organized with OurHashtag, a Triangle-based social media group.

The group tries to host tweetups each quarter, said Jeffrey L. Cohen, a partner in OurHashtag. Tweetups allow people who know each other from Twitter, the microblogging site, to meet in person and share ideas about online communication.

“It’s a way to get together to put a face with a Twitter name,” Cohen said.

The first Triangle tweetup in 2007 attracted five people to a coffee shop. The group’s 2009 spring get-together attracted 250 people.

Attendees at the fair tweetup will be able to sample some of the fair’s deep-fried offerings, interact with fair entertainers and participate in a scavenger hunt using Twitter.

While most of these competitions are aimed at young people, [state fair spokesman Brian] Long hopes they don’t spend all their time in the gaming tent.

“If we can get young people in and still use the fair to educate them about the importance of agriculture, that’s a good thing.”

This past week was Triangle Tech Week (search #tritech), where we had social media or technology events every day this week in the Triangle region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) of North Carolina. It was a long week, and considering that me and my OurHashtag partners planned several of them, I have been resting and recovering today. The following tweet from @theRab lists all the events. He worked very hard to get six events listed in 140 characters. He was very proud of the tweet and other retweeted it.

Monday: Triangle Tweetup

While the last Triangle Tweetup (search #triangletweetup) had over 250 people, we had a “flash” Triangle Tweetup to kick off the week at Edge Office in Glenwood South in Downtown Raleigh. We announced it Monday morning.

We started by congratulating Jazzy Chad on his new gig with Twitter. Don’t worry, he’s staying in Raleigh, and will be helping them out part-time. According to this blog post, Chad was such an integral part of the Twitter community in both his creation of Tweetgrid and his customer support, that Twitter took notice.

We talked about the use of professional tools for Twitter. We discussed the features and benefits of CoTweet, HootSuite, TweetGrid and Seismic. We talked about how these different tools allow organizations to manage incoming and outgoing tweets for customer service, and how to implement that into a business workflow.

Tuesday: Westend Tweetup

On Tuesday, we gathered at Carrboro Creative Coworking for the first Westend Tweetup (search #westendtweetup). This gathering of Chapel Hill/Carrboro Twitter users and those looking to learn more about Twitter was organized by Greg deLima. Wayne Sutton led a discussion based on a Twitter presentation he gave 2 years ago. It was interesting to see that much about the Twitter world had not changed. An awful lot of the infrastructure of the platform and core users were in place at that time. Sure, some logos had changed, many more tools are available to interface with Twitter, but the principles of building a following and engaging have not changed.

Wednesday: Ignite Raleigh

Our big event for the week was Ignite Raleigh, and we had approximately 500 people join us at the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Raleigh. Ignite events happen all over the world and they are about sharing ideas in a simple format. The tag line is “Enlighten us, but make it quick.” Each presenter gets 5 minutes and 20 slides to share their ideas. And the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. 10 speakers were chosen by the community through an open voting process, and 5 speakers were selected by the organizers. We asked Zach Ward of DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro to MC, and he did a fabulous job.

The event also included internet comic musicians Rhett and Link and DJ Rosseau spinning tunes throughout the event.

The Carolina Rollergirls helped us out by introducing the sponsor commercials and announcing the door prize winners. They did not skate around, but they did chase a few people around.

Here is a link to the presenters and their presentations, and here’s a link to the list of blog posts and other online coverage of the event. As organizers, there are certainly some things we could have done better, as there always are, but overall the event was a great success. Everyone seemed leave entertained, inspired and in an upbeat mood. Sounds like a success to me. We are already planning the next Ignite.

Thursday: Triangle Social Media Club

Photo by Wayne Sutton

On Thursday we hosted a Triangle Social Club at iContact in Durham which featured a demo of Google Wave by Jay Cuthrell. Jay attended the Google Wave announcement event and has been using the Dev Preview of Google’s new development platform that will bring email, documents and collaboration together. An ongoing thread or conversation is called a wave, and new information is tracked as it is added to the wave, so someone can view later everything that was contributed in the order it was added. We also heard about bots that can be added to waves with stupid names like spelly and linky. There are also annoying bots that convert a wave to pirate speak or show everything in comic speech balloons. Here’s Jay’s presentation, but the real interest of the meeting was in seeing wave in action.

Friday: BarcampRDU Pre-party

The night before BarcampRDU there is a traditional gathering for beer. This year was no exception and it occurred at Raleigh’s Flying Saucer.

Saturday: BarcampRDU

This was my first year attending BarcampRDU. My schedule had never worked out previously, but I also always thought it was too technical. There was a big development crowd there, but I attended sessions on marketing, startups, Google Wave (presented by a guy from Google who is based in Chapel Hill), and a Geek Dad one. I also lead a session titled “Potpourri for $500,” which I will discuss in a separate post. A big shoutout to Dave Johnson and all the other organizers and volunteers for a great unconference.

The crowd learning about Google Wave

The session grid

The last men standing. Wayne and I were the only ones who attended all 6 events of Triangle Tech Week and we were exhausted. If anyone else had joined us at all 6 events and appeared in this photo, they would have received a prize. Since we would be the ones presenting the prize, we did not bother giving it to ourselves.

If you attended any of the events of Triangle Tech Week, or even just followed them online, we hope you met some new people, learned some new things and were inspired by the community here in North Carolina’s Triangle.

Photo by Josh Hofer, part of the Triangle Tweetup Photobooth

Thursday night was the latest Triangle Tweetup, a gathering of local people who use Twitter. The above picture shows 4 of the 5 people who attended the first Triangle Tweetup in December 2007 (me, @waynesutton, @therab, @ginnyskal). As we prepared for this Tweetup, I noticed that lots of new people were tweeting about the event. I sensed that it would be big.

I arrived early and helped Wayne Sutton and Kipp Bodnar decide what to do about the chairs. I predicted over a hundred people would show up, and there were just a handful of chairs. We wound up moving the chairs to the side, leaving most of the space in front of the speakers open for standing.

People started arriving around 6:45 for a 7:00 event. There were lots of faces that I didn’t recognize. Twitter has been growing and our little community of users in the Triangle is growing along with it. One of the reasons for the event was to help new users learn how to use Twitter more effectively, whether for business or pleasure. I was one of the scheduled speakers for the evening, so it was important for me to understand how many newbies were in the crowd. I was planning on sharing my blogs and video projects in a way that would let me pass on some Twitter tips. No presentation to change if I needed to adjust my words. All I required was a browser.

As 7:00 rolled around, people were still streaming in the door. I was starting to get a little overwhelmed. Not from a crowd point of view, or even nervous about speaking, but from a people and connections point of view. There have been loads of people I have met over the past year that I see at these regular social media gatherings. I like to catch up and chat with them a bit. We may keep up on Twitter or through our blogs, but these friendships are stronger when you meet in person, or IRL, shorthand for in real life. And I just didn’t know if I would have a chance to talk to them all.

In addition to people I knew, there were also people I wanted to meet. These are people the I have begun communicating with recently, but have never met. I might have even started in past few days as they said they were coming to the Tweetup. And there were probably even some people who wanted to meet me. Since I was on the agenda as a speaker, they might have figured I knew something about Twitter. That part is true.

The event began and I moved through the crowd, taking pictures and stopping to chat with friends. It was such a big crowd that I had trouble finding a vantage point to capture it. The above photo shows part of it, but there were many more people who don’t show up in this view.

It was finally time for me to present and that was a blast. I knew what I wanted to say. I had an order to click through my blogs. And I think it went pretty well. I wasn’t nervous trying to talk to all those people. It was good practice for me presenting to a crowd. I need to do more of it. I also managed to video tape the crowd wishing the Triangle Tweeple Team good luck in the Krispy Kreme Challenge.

And finally, I met some new people that I will continue to tweet with, until the next tweetup when I will go expecting to see them. And if I didn’t get a chance to meet you, contact me through here or Twitter. We can grab a cup of coffee and I can find out what you are up to. I would be happy to give you a few tips about Twitter too.

Friday night I joined several local tweeps (Twitter users) at Frankie’s Fun Park for a night of fun. Early arrival James went off to play mini-golf and Ice Ball, so was not a triathlon participate. The plan evolved over the evening as Wayne, Kipp, Marshall and I traveled from one attraction to another. Since this was a new media outing, there were plenty of pictures, plus live streaming video, the whole evening.

We started with LaserTag. The blue team, with me, Wayne and Kipp, won, while Marshall was on the losing green team.

Next up was GoKarts. The final standings were Wayne, me, Kipp and Marshall. Here’s Wayne’s video of the whole race.

Photo by Wayne
And finally, we played some Air Hockey. Wayne and I beat Kipp and Marshall.

Just for good measure, Wayne played a Nascar game and came in first.

We all had a blast and the night ended with trash talking and demands for re-matches. Here’s a link to the rest of my photos.

Yesterday evening I went to the latest Triangle Tweetup in Durham. This event of local people connected through Twitter was held at iContact. It was nice that the event on this side of the Triangle. It was smaller group than last time, but it was still nice to see friends from my social media circle. The interesting part of the event was that we were connected via a video stream to an Atlanta Entrepreneurs Group and Robert Scoble. He is one of the Twitter celebrities. He is following over 21,000 people and often answers the question, how do you follow so many. He scans tweets quickly and determines that most are not useful to him. He views Twitter as a big social experiment and he just follows along.

The Atlanta folks were all too new to Twitter to even have any questions, so the event was a bit light on interactivity. After we turned off the stream, we talked about other micro-blogging platforms. While people appreciate the open source model of identi.ca, because of the community on Twitter, no on has really latched on to other services. It will be interesting in the future to see what causes the mass of early adopters to move and follow their communities off Twitter. I was chastised a bit for using ping.fm to broadcast my updates to multiple platforms, and did not follow up by participating in their communities. I check Twitter frequently, and don’t check the others enough to warrant posting there. I guess I need to find a new way to update my status on Facebook.

The rest of my photos are here on Flickr.

Photo by Abby

Last night I attended the Triangle Tweetup, a gathering of local Twitter users. It’s great to be part of this growing community. We had some demos on how folks are creating Twitter applications, and doing other things in the social media / new technology space. One very cool example is Twitter Movie Reviews, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators to track people’s opinions of new movies. These reviews reflect the Twitter community, which skews younger and tech-savvy, but it is still of value as a pop culture barometer.

Nice to see some Raleigh-area friends that I usually just see on Twitter, and meet some new folks. Too many folks to shout out (see above). Can’t wait to see where this community can go.

Here’s a link to flickr photos tagged with TriangleTweetup


A rare photo of me by Abby

Last night I went to a Social Media event, called the Triangle Tweetup. It was a gathering of like-minded people interested in Social Media, but self-selected by being on Twitter. It was good conversation, both in presentation mode and in mingle mode. I saw some old friends (in internet time that may mean someone I met 2 weeks ago) and made some new friends (people I have been following on Twitter, but never met in person). There is a growing Social Media community in the Triangle, and it is exciting to be at the beginning of this local movement.

Here is a link to Flickr photos tagged for this event.

Thanks to Wayne Sutton for organizing and to Jeff Tippett and Lisa Creech Bledsoe from Calvert Holdings for hosting. And finally, congratulations to Abbyladybug for tweeting more than me (and everyone else in the room) with the #Triangletweetup reference to hashtags and winning an ipod.