A Blogger Meeting & Social Networking

On Monday night, we attended our first meeting with the Bloggers and Journalists group from Social Media Charlotte. We joined this group about a month ago, and have been really excited to participate in their monthly meetings. The guest speaker this month was Jeff Elder, syndicated columnist and social media expert for the the Charlotte Observer. Jeff spent a year in Silicon Valley studying social networking at Stanford University. During this time, he visited Twitter and Facebook, met with the leaders of both of these companies, toured their campuses, and conducted case studies.

We learned so many things that night from Jeff, but some of the most interesting were that Facebook has over 300 million users worldwide (the most used social network), but that they haven't found a way to make it profitable yet. So many people use their service, but many refuse to use it anymore if there is a charge for it. Right now, their main source of revenue are the "gifts" that they sell to send to other Facebook users. What??? Also, we were intrigued to know more about the "graying" of Facebook. As of last year, there were more folks over the age of 55 becoming users on Facebook than those 18 years old and younger. That was very surprising to us.

Twitter is a totally different story. The service is very well known (branding) but it is completely underused. 75% of Twitter accounts are dead, meaning, there are no "tweets" from the user. 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of the "tweets" that are posted. For some reason, Twitter seems to be used mostly by media savvy people. That may change in the future, but for now, this is what is happening. We also discussed social media etiquette, using social networking to build communities, using Twitter and Facebook to get leads for stories, and whether or not Twitter can really help to build a business.

Since we began this blog last year, we have been interested in learning more about social networking and blogging, so we joined this blogger and journalist group. They meet once a month, usually at Amelie's French Bakery in Charlotte, NC, and have a guest speaker who talks about issues related to social networking and writing. The meetings are usually held on the 2nd Monday of the month from 6:30-8:30pm. If interested, look at Social Media Charlotte to check the calendar for updates.