By JC HEWITT | Guest Writer
Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup, spoke at a small midtown conference center earlier this month about how he expects social networking to evolve for local communities and businesses. He expects that his platform will encourage web denizens to turn away from communicating with one another online, and instead turn the focus towards local organization.
“The internet is the world’s greatest organizing tool,” said Heiferman. “People go from seeing themselves as a consumer to a co-creator. They are powerful. One of the best ways to create value is to unleash it in people connecting.”
Heiferman criticized the online status quo. “Millions of years of evolution has created a species that gets something special out of face to face,” Heiferman said. “People are sick of packaged products and institutions. Human scale is preferable compared to the bizarro world we increasingly live in, where you never really talk to anyone.”
The Meetup CEO described how meetups are increasingly charging money to members for special events or seeking sponsorships from local businesses or larger corporations. He said meetups that charge money, hold regular meetings, have a set leadership structure and tend to have superior levels of engagement relative to others.
He brought up examples like hiking meetups sponsored by outdoors equipment shops and biking groups sponsored by local bike shops. This method allows companies to garner attention and build engagement with their customers without using conventional advertising. According to Heiferman, small businesses and startups that serve a coherent local community will have an advantage in using these channels to reach customers.
Meetup itself primarily raises revenue through charging a membership fee to group organizers. Heiferman said that the company is phasing out advertising on the site to create a more engaging user experience.
He shared the stage with Andrew Ran Wong, a 25-year-old Chinese immigrant who created the New York Entrepreneur Business Network (NYEBN) as a Meetup group in May 2009. That group runs routine networking events and seminars in Manhattan that often receive more than 400 RSVPs, according to the numbers publicly provided by Meetup. The group has more than 3,600 accounts signed up.
“I don’t think we can describe the size of this community by using a number. We do at least one event per week. Eventually, we are going to grow to be a very big size. I want the community to self-organize,” Wong said.
The networking events hosted through NYEBN attract a diverse crowd of all ages and from different sectors of the economy. Holistic health providers mingle in at luxury event spaces with lawyers, web designers, programmers, marketers, investment bankers, and consultants. Wong grew NYEBN rapidly through blogging and other social media promotion.
Guest Author: JC Hewitt is a freelance writer and blogger based out of Brooklyn, New York.
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