Last Friday night I went to the very first Long Beach Tweetup where people are on Twitter and live in the Long Beach area, get together and just have great conversations in person!  LA, San Diego, and a few other major cities have already organized their own Tweetups and a few us in the Long Beach area decided to create our own group.

I was really excited to meet these people who I have been talking to on Twitter for months.  It wasn’t uncomfortable like online dating, and I wasn’t skeptic about meeting these people because I knew we all had common interests.  After a couple of drinks, I learned a lot about my fellow Tweeters.  I learned that a lot of us have jobs within social media, that one of them lives on the next street over from me, that some of them have kids, and surprisingly two tweeters became friends via Twitter because they had at one point dated the same guy!  Seriously, it should be the next soap opera drama on Youtube.

It was definitely a great experience and is something we’re going to continue doing every month.  We’ve even started our own LBCTweetup blog.  You can find pictures of us playing games at Gameworks and even a video of me failing at DDR.

NIECEE’s TAKE AWAYS:

• Virtual meets Reality Networking. I’ve worked for an online dating company before and know that meeting people virtually to reality can be hard.  When it’s in the context of networking I think people are less fearful because it’s a group effort and they know that they can learn from each other’s experiences.