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: