July 2010
6 posts
Your resource for sparking Meetups Everywhere
Folks like Foursquare, Etsy, Mashable and others have sparked hundreds of Meetups in just a few weeks. It’s easier than you’d think, but there are some tricks that will make you more successful.
We’ve assembled examples on setup, getting the word out and how to cultivate and celebrate. Riff on them, do it better… if you put together something awesome, we’ll...
ONE: Setup in Five Minutes
Fill out a few things and you’re on your way to Meetups Everywhere!
How to setup your Meetup Everywhere
TWO: Get the Word Out!
There are several tricks that will help mobilize your community to self-organize Meetups Everywhere.
How to get the word out
THREE: Celebrate & Cultivate
Stay engaged with your community everywhere to maximize the momentum from your Meetups.
How to celebrate and cultivate
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From a Mashable Meetup in Greece [photo by Andreas Kontokanis]
“Use the internet to get off the internet.”
– Scott Heiferman, CEO and Co-Founder of Meetup
June 2010
53 posts
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Case Study: MASHABLE
Mashable kicked off over 600 Meetups on June 30th by
declaring a global holiday
rallying their readers with a couple blog posts
embedding their Meetup map on mashable.com.
Now they’ve called on their community to make Mashable Meetups a monthly global phenomena.
Recipe for their secret sauce here.
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Case Study: ETSY
It’s easiest to get Meetups going everywhere when you keep things simple. Just tell your people to get together over some coffee to talk!
That said, it can be a real blast to go big. Etsy had a global birthday bash of 512 Meetups to celebrate their fifth anniversary! Their
super fun blog post
sponsored competition
download-able online grab bag
Flickr group
really took their party...
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Case Study: APARTMENT THERAPY
Apartment Therapy’s Meetup Everywhere exemplified how to scale face-to-face interaction the easy way — by challenging readers to self-organize their own national movement.
Look behind the curtain here.
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Sweeten the deal
A bit of carrot goes a long way. Offer an incentive (schwag!) or propose a competition: The top _#_ Meetups will get _____. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate giveaway, and you can get some ideas here.
Look what happened between Houston and Dallas, Texas when they vied for the largest Etsy Meetup in the world…
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TWO: Get the word out!
The more people you send to your Meetup Everywhere, the more activity you’ll see.
An exciting blog post announcing your Meetup Everywhere is crucial, but it’s also super simple. Let your followers know about this opportunity for them to meet each other face-to-face and build their community. As long as there’s a clear call-to-action, you should be all set — urge people...
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Embed a map of your Meetups...
… in a prominent place on your site.
Plugging in one line of code gets you an interactive map that will look something like this.
This little guy packs a punch. Besides displaying an up-to-the-minute map of all your Meetups, it shows whichever are happening closest to the person viewing it. Best yet, there’s a link so others can grab the code to embed the widget on their own...
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Case Study: MASHABLE
Mashable has a super devoted following of active readers. It was only natural that they provide them with a way to meetup with each other.
They decided that the best way to rally everyone was to declare one date when they could all meetup. But what day? They decreed that, henceforth, June 30th would be known as Social Media Day. People all over the world would rise up to celebrate this new...
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Encourage use of a common tag
Create a tag or “hashtag” for your event series. These tags condense conversations on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube so attendees all around the world can connect with each other. Pick a short (<10 characters) tag that represents your brand and the Meetups. (You can also use our awesome hashtag generator in the create page for your Meetup Everywhere.) Examples: Mashable = #smday...
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Pop-in on the conversation
It’s fun participating in the conversations going on around your brand and the Meetups!
Visit the Meetups online in different cities to leave comments. People get really excited and it encourages more activity.
Subscribe to a feed of all mentions of the hashtag you made, so you can @reply on Twitter.
Comment on a Facebook post about a Meetup.
Community members love to be surprised by...
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Drop an email to folks who've signed up
Emailing the members of your Meetups is one of the simplest and best ways to show your love, and it’ll have a far-reaching effect. All you have to do is say hi and recognize how flipping cool it is that they’re meeting up.
It’s also great to send a special message to the organizers of your Meetups to let them know you appreciate their efforts. (Maybe a little schwag is in...
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THREE: Celebrate & Cultivate
After your first wave of Meetups has passed, you are going to want to maximize the momentum, and it doesn’t take much — people naturally want to keep meeting up! All you need to do is
put the call out in an email and/or blog post to challenge folks to Meetup again
make it a routine to recognize those people meeting up and encourage more people to get involved
Maybe you want to make a...
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Case Study: APARTMENT THERAPY
New York fans of the blog Apartment Therapy have been meeting up locally since 2007. Apartment Therapy’s founder Maxwell recognized the value of those meetings, saying, “While we’ve grown as an online community, there is no replacement for real face to face meetings OFFLINE.”
But how do you scale that offline interaction from one city to many?
They took things global...
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Call on your community to keep it going!
Mashable not only declared that June 30th is Social Media Day, they decided that Mashable Meetups should happen monthly.
We want this to be a launching point for you to build a lasting relationship with your social media community by continuing to host Monthly Mashable Meetups using our Meetup Everywhere page, or more frequently if you think it works better for your community.
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Room to grow
The readers of Apartment Therapy are passionate not only about the blog, but about meeting up!
Maxwell did an amazing job here of celebrating the folks who got together, and highlighting the intimate Meetups that arose because of them. He also set the expectation that people will meetup routinely.
Last week, out of the 114 meetups where at least one person signaled their intention to meetup,...
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Collect the media from your Meetups
People will tweet, blog and take photos and video at your Meetups. One of the best ways to bring your community together is to make sure they see each others’ content.
Because you let everyone know ahead of time that they should use a common tag, just visit places like Twitter, Flicker, and YouTube to search for anything with your tag. Share the really fun stuff in a celebratory ...
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Jump on in
Be sure to pop into the conversations on Meetup, Twitter, and Facebook, and send a quick checkin email to the members of your Meetups. All you have to do is say hi and recognize how flipping cool it is that they’re meeting up. [It’s also great to send a special message to the organizers of your Meetups to let them know you appreciate their efforts. (Maybe a little schwag is in...
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Easy as 1-2-3!
SoundCloud created a page on their site devoted getting people involved with their Meetups.
It did an elegant job of giving people a 1-2-3 for jumping on board, and encouraged the common tag. They also suggested that SoundClouders get SoundCloud groups going for attendees. Swoon!
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Emphasize self-organize
Foursquare really emphasized the self-org nature of Meetups Everywhere — the perfect way to scale your efforts, and that of your fans!
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The M logo is a great tool, too!
This is truly a beautiful screen capture. Evernote not only made a fantastic blog post and embedded the map on the right side of their side, they included the adorable M logo amongst their social links.
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Case Study: ETSY
Etsy’s fifth birthday was approaching, and what better way to celebrate than with a giant bash involving Etsy-philes all over the world?
They set up a Meetup Everywhere with the idea that people could get together for Craft Parties on June 18th. Their blog post detailed what they envisioned, how people could get involved, and what the Meetup Everywhere platform was all about. They...
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Tweet your heart out
Shakira linked to her Meetup Everywhere page to bring fans together to do the Waka Waka dance for a good cause, at Meetups all over the world!
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Get crafty
Etsy really went all out with their blog post to announce their Meetups Everywhere. They set up a competition, created a Flickr group for photos, created a downloadable party pack, and included some FAQs. They even created badges people could embed on their own sites to help promote!
You don’t have to do such an elaborate kickoff, but it never hurts to be creative!
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ONE: Setup in Five Minutes
People in your community want to meetup. Get them going by encouraging everyone to have their first Meetup on the same day all over the world (a more routine Meetup schedule can follow).
The big day is just an excuse, but it’s fun to know that your 4-person Meetup in Springfield is one of many happening on the same day across the globe.
Some fun examples include:
* Celebrate on official...
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Mashable creates a new global holiday
You can too! Though, Social Media Day is now taken.
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Throw one big birthday bash!
Etsy celebrated their fifth anniversary in style. Gotta love the competition they weaved in too!
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Get the ideas going
Jason Fried gave some ideas for what folks could discuss at their Meetups.
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Set the tone
SoundCloud set the tone well for their Meetups Everywhere with a friendly description that told people what the goal is, what to do, and also encourages them to start SoundCloud groups for their Meetups.
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Crafting some competition
Etsy gets the competition going by promising goodies to the top 50 Craft Party Meetups with the most RSVPs.
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True love
Megan and Kimberly of Squidoo are all over their Meetup Everywhere, leaving friendly comments in their wake.
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Incentive ahoy!
Tony Hsieh rallied his readers to Meetup and celebrate the release of Delivering Happiness. As an incentive, they promised to send an advanced copy of the book to those people who stepped up as organizers by June 1st.
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Post updates
Leading up to the first day of your Meetups, blog, email, tweet and Facebook post about the progress. Share fun stats about the people and cities getting involved. Brag about milestones — “We’re now in ___ cities!” Simple posts can do a lot!
Just be sure celebrate the whole range of activity, from the lone person getting things going in their own city, to those Meetups...
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Front and center (or to the side)
The A VC Meetups Everywhere map is the only widget on Fred Wilson’s blog.
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Easy as one-line-of-code pie
TechCrunch wrote a blog post, embedded their Meetups Everywhere map in a prominent, static place on their site and — bam! — readers self-organized all over the world.
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Make your presence known, everywhere
Mashable set up some brilliant guides here about how best to leverage social media on their — you guessed it — Social Media Day. They suggested no less than three ways to incorporate tags.
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Keep it simple
TechCrunch celebrated their fifth birthday with Meetups Everywhere. The scale of their party wound up being huge, but the idea was simple — just get together with other TechCrunch fans for beer or coffee, and good times.
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Tweet, too!
Commenting in the Meetups online is an awesome way to stoke activity and show you care. So is re-tweeting and @tweeting!
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Get into it
TechCrunch’s excitement over this chance for their readers to Meetup was evident in their blog posts about it. This is the second post they made, and it cited cities all over the world that were set to participate in the global birthday celebration.
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Tying your Meetups to an already existing holiday
Huffington Post Green compelled their readers to turn their concern about the Gulf oil spill into Meetups on World Oceans Day.
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Putting the everywhere in Everywhere
Foursquare gets amped about such a huge display of love by their fans.
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Etsy Craft Party Flickr group
You must go look at Etsy’s Flickr group for where crafters can share their images pertaining to their Meetups — snapshots from the party itself, crafts for the party, preparations people wanted to share, etc.
[photo by rachellovespeace]
Bet you can’t look at just one!
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This is how you do a global Meetup video
The day after TechCrunch’s Meetups Everywhere, they posted a montage of videos their fans took all over the world, “as a thank you and tribute to our readers… to highlight your efforts.”
It’s a beautiful representation of the Meetups great and small, far and wide, that happened to salute a common love of TechCrunch.