I talked to David Binkowski (twitter: www.twitter.com/dbinkowski) at the Salt Lake City TweetUp last night. It was a lot of fun and many people I haven’t met because I’ve been somewhat out of the scene. Now that I have a more active family life and moved further away, my networking has slowed down. Which means I don’t know as many people when I do show up.

I learned from David how to host a successful event and reach bloggers. He said they (he works with Wells Fargo who sponsored the event) tried inviting bloggers to an event. Didn’t work. Because bloggers often have day jobs, families, and are busy. So he looked for cities bloggers were already meeting and offered to sponsor an existing event. He found pictures of past TweetUps, saw that Salt Lake had an active crowd, and offered to buy everyone dinner. Bloggers love free food (and it was great food). Twitterers do too.

This is a simple yet great advice. Better to find people you want to reach where they are already congregating than to create your own event and hope they show up. Offer to help out. Anyone who wants to sponsor a Utah blogger or TweetUp feel free to use my contact form. Or contact Ghennipher, who sets up the TweetUps.

My only gripe is this – I wish I had more background on Wells Fargo social media and why they were sponsoring the event beforehand. Perhaps a link to a blog post about the event with relevant links (like this one except to the source – too lazy to find!). I went in not knowing what to expect and I would’ve enjoyed talking to Tim Collins if I’d known more about him going in. I thought they were probably from a local office but Tim flew in from LA and David from New York.

A big thank you to Wells Fargo and to Ghennipher for setting this up (here’s her post on the event)!

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