Oh Poor little Tweetup how they hurt you!

Let me start of with a disclaimer:

I am NOT a “Social Media Guru”, nor do I really care to be. If you consider yourself a “Social Media Guru” then please proceed to lift your right hand and run it across your face in a repetitive motion – shoot for somewhere in between full blown concussion and common sense.

Last month Maria De Los Angeles (@vicequeenmaria) wrote a piece on her Miami New Times blog (SiliconBeach) about Tweetups. That blog post kept me thinking…and thinking… and , yea, thinking. The term “Tweetup” is being bastardize by all of the people that just don’t get the central premise behind a Tweetup – community.

There are too many so-called Tweetups that first put personal or corporate ambitions/goals before the community. Don’t get me wrong people, I’m all about product/promotion/placement/price – I’m a business person after all. But as marketers we need to understand the tools that we use – their limitations and expectations.

We’re REALLY good at knowing this for traditional marketing methods but are pretty clueless, by in large, when it comes to social media. We tend to just treat it like another distribution channel and apply traditional strategies to a very dynamic ecosystem. It’s a very mechanical, in genuine and inorganic approach that yields very little engagement and a lot of noise.

So, enough of the Textbook talk! Here are a couple of things that I noticed that, to be honest with you, make me want to donkey punch myself in the jugular.

A Tweetup isn’t about YOU

A Tweetup isn’t about you or your product/service. A Tweetup is about the community and a certain commonality amongst those people attending.
A great example is Koa PR’s “SexyShoeup”. Theres no hidden agenda or products being pitched. Its just done because there is an innate human need to congregate around other people that are similar. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t corporate involvement in the event.  HER Energy Drink ended up sponsoring the event. But the premise was born out of a NEED/WANT in the community, not a desire to pitch. So if anything, the business in this case is supplementing to the event and are strategically aligning their products/services with an event that caters to their demographic.

Whats the takeaway? If you have a business, you’re better off either a) helping/sponsoring a Tweetup that caters to your target market or b) having a Tweetup about something that your target market cares about or has in common – NOT your product.

A Tweeup has a low barrier to entry

Seriously people, I shouldn’t have to PAY to attend a Tweetup. If you’re a company and in order to participate in your Tweetup I have to jump through hoops or pay to attend you’re in for a huge disappointment. Make it DIRT simple for people to participate. If you have the right cause/reason for a Tweetup, you don’t even have to give us anything (though free stuff is always cool) we’ll just for the sake of meeting new and interesting like-minded people.

Wow, this is a long post, I’ll spare you guys any further pain… just the three and a half cents.