RISE Austin and Innotech San Antonio">RISE Austin and Innotech San Antonio

It’s been a great week of meet­ing new folks, recon­nect­ing with old friends and knowl­edge shar­ing. On Tues­day, I was priv­i­leged to speak dur­ing the RISE Austin 3-day multi-location event at the Mex­i­can Amer­i­can Cul­tural Cen­ter. The topic of my ses­sion was “Cul­ti­vat­ing Com­mu­nity With Social Media At The Local Level”. It was based upon my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence of cre­at­ing the San Anto­nio Pod­cast­ing com­mu­nity in 2005 which then led to orga­niz­ing Pod­Camp San Anto­nio in 2007/2008, Startup Week­end San Anto­nio in 2008, Bar­camp San Anto­nio in 2008, Social Media Club San Anto­nio and Social Media Break­fast San Antonio.

Once I cre­ated the first group, I was able to find other pas­sion­ate folks to help cham­pion future groups and events. The same can be true for any­one. What­ever your pas­sion, hobby, busi­ness or non-profit the social media tools can be a great tool to find “your people”.

Here are the pre­sen­ta­tion slides from the session:

Then on Thurs­day, Susan Price of Fire­cat Stu­dio and I pre­sented at Innotech San Anto­nio. We had a morn­ing ses­sion called, “Twit­ter: A Busi­ness Tool Or A Com­plete Waste Of Time?” (< –I think you know my answer to this). The group was com­prised of about a 50/50 mix of folks who were either on Twit­ter or Twitter-curious.

In the after­noon we did a ses­sion, “Build­ing Com­mu­nity Online and Offline using Social Media”. We used the Co-Working model as a way to illus­trate how social media can be used to keep folks con­nected both online 24/7. How­ever, the value of face-to-face com­mu­nity should not be over­looked. For the busi­ness per­son, Co-Working gath­er­ings are a way to have the best of both worlds. With only 25 min­utes, the ses­sions went by at break­neck speed. The slides for the “Build­ing Com­mu­nity” can be seen here: