Tampa Tweetup Sees Record Crowd, Media Coverage

Yesterday afternoon, I took the family over to the Florida Aquarium for the Tampa Tweetup. It went extremely well. Estimates are that we had around 250 people attend the event – which leaves me speculating on whether this is perhaps the largest in-person tweetup that has occurred anywhere so far.

The History Of This Group

The evolution of this group has been stellar. It all started when Jeremiah Owyang flew to Tampa on business and tweeted out a call for local tweeters to get together for dinner. We ended up having a group of 15-20 people show up at a restaurant in south Tampa. That’s where I met Josh Carrico (who still claims he’s not a blogger ), Sarah Perez (who writes for ReadWriteWeb and Microsoft’s Channel 10), Robert Nelson (a local professional tech blogger) and several others.

Separately, Loren Baker, of Search Engine Journal, started a group on Meetup for Tampa Bloggers. That group expanded up to perhaps 15 people and I had a chance to meet several local bloggers, including Mark Jaquith, the lead developer for WordPress who happens to live within minutes of me and I never knew.

Loren eventually ended up stopping that Meetup in order to focus on SEO stuff (which is his specialty). Josh took over and the group has been expanding ever since.

I remember when the Tampa Tweetup was a group of only 4 people, sitting in a Starbucks up in north Tampa. It was myself, Sarah, Robert and Josh. That was it!

Fast forward to May of 2009. We had 250+ people attend a tweetup at the aquarium. The last large tweetup at the Museum of Science and Industry got press coverage in the local paper. Yesterday’s tweetup has, so far, received coverage by the local Fox News affiliate. The news story, titled appropriately, is “All It Took Was a Tweet”.

Josh and Julia Gorzka (from Brand Tampa) are together organizing all the tweetups now, and both are doing an awesome job with it. Josh uses the site TampaBloggers.com as the hub for the event.

Using Twitter To Foster Relationships

This is what Twitter is all about.

In our case, a bunch of like-minded people all lived and worked in the Tampa area and we never knew it. It took Twitter to get us connected. As I discovered, Tampa Bay has a much larger and well-connected high-tech crowd than I would have thought. We tend to think of areas like San Francisco when it comes to tech, but the Tampa and Orlando area is bustling with people who work in this industry. It really is fantastic.

I encourage people who use Twitter to do so with creating real relationships in mind. Here in my local area, many of us now interact in person regularly. Even when I travel, though, I have the opportunity to meet up with people I follow on Twitter all the time. In fact, it is now rare that I go to a conference and not have several people walk up to me, telling me they wanted to meet me, knowing my name, knowing what I look like – all from Twitter and my blog.

So, get out there and attend a tweetup. And if there isn’t one, take the initiative and start a group. You’ll find it to be very rewarding.