Short Hair Diva

As much as I brag about the fact that Greg Grunberg mentioned me on Twitter back in 2010–yeah I’ll shut up about it now–I am super-duper excited that Lisa Loeb retweeted one of my replies to her 30,000+ followers. Awww.

I love Lisa’s music and her always-adorable glasses, even though I hate wearing mine and get ticked off when I run out of contacts.

Last Wednesday night I went to the Tampa Bay Brewing Company in Ybor City for Tampa’s version of Mashable‘s Social Media Day. Everyone that was planning to attend had been discussing the event on Twitter with the hashtag #TMMUP.

Considering that I hadn’t “gone out” anywhere since having a baby in October 2008, this was a semi-big deal to me even though it seemed like most of the people there attend meetup events regularly. In my case, it just felt odd to be out in public without a diaper bag— let alone out in public without a diaper bag and an alcoholic beverage in my hand.

I met quite a few cool people (not counting the guy sitting next to me at the bar that asked me to “teach him about Twitter” until he noticed I was there with my husband) and I also realized a few important things to take into consideration when you’re going to meet of meet a bunch of people that you “know online”:

• Arrive on time. This event officially began at 6 PM, but we got there around 7:30 PM. We had to take the Little Diva to grandma and grandpa’s house and drive over an hour to even get to Ybor City, so once we threw in some “stopping to eat dinner” time, we wound up being pretty late.
• Wear a name tag. Next time I attend any sort of social media event I think I’ll wear a T-shirt with my Twitter name on it. There weren’t any name tag stickers left by the time we arrived and it was pretty noisy inside, so most conversations I had involved, “What’s your name? What? Oh, okay, so what’s your name on Twitter?”
• Bring a camera. The few photos I have were taken with my iPhone, and they’re pretty low quality because it was so dark inside. I was able to correct them somewhat with Photoshop, but they’re just not that great. I’m sad to admit that I own a $900 camera and left it sitting at home.

This is kind of last minute, but the social media superblog Mashable has declared June 30th Social Media Day and Mashable Meetups are taking place across the globe! People are getting together with friends and colleagues and planning to connect with Twitter followers and Facebook fans that they haven’t even met in real life– yet, anyway!

Tomorrow evening I’ll be attending the Tampa Social Media Day meetup at the Tampa Bay Brewing Company in Ybor City and meeting up with everyone from Twitter.

Hope to see you there!