I don't really know what else I can add to what has already been said other than I'm all for social-media-appreciative events so long as there's no forced agenda, and the focus is on informally connecting with local people who are passionate about meeting others and learning new things about how other people use social media to do cool things. The thing is, there were people there who have experienced something really cool using social media, or executed a really successful campaign, or know about something happening in the social space that's worth sharing with others; but the event didn't allow for these people to connect directly with the people who cared or wanted to know more.

What I think we need is a place (offline) that allows people to connect, discuss, and discover new things based on their particular social media interests. Let the marketers mingle with non-marketers. Let the marketers share successes and challenges about current campaigns their working on. Let people talk about their favorite aspects of a particular channel or the new plugin they discovered for WordPress that everyone should know about. Roundtables could be a great solution, but so could tables at bars… Point is, Social Media Day (whether monthly, quarterly, or annually) should be about discovery and connecting, not Mashable, and not awkward sales pitches for your personal social media mission.

Thanks for writing this!

If they could iron out the kinks, I might reconsider my opinion on making it a reoccurring event. It was good to come to a social media meetup and it not be about education.

As for repeating this event I have mixed feelings. I do feel like there could be a reason to bring people together for a more informal meetup. Most of the events we do are so focused on education, it might be nice to just relax and get a chance to mingle with people – especially new faces. Jeff mentioned quarterly and I think that might be a good middle ground between yearly and monthly. I think we could also do away with some of the pre-planned activities that can feel a little strained and just focus on the socializing part. Maybe we can set up small groups or round tables to sort of mix everyone up and get them talking to different people. It might work as a nice counterpart to more serious events like SMC and AZIMA.

Anyways, great analysis, thanks for the post!

Some of the storytime stuff came as poor reaction to the heat issue, but definitely didn't work – at least on that scale. I liked hearing the different social media things people were excited about locally more than the individual stories. A casualty of limited planning for the most part.

I'd be up for Quarterly, but Monthly as Mashable suggests is way too much. There is a ton of stuff going on in Phoenix already in the social space, and while networking is fun I think we'll burn it out if we do it too often.