Saturday, September 12, 2009

Victoria Twestival

Last night was Victoria's first Twestival-a fundraising event for Power To Be which provides outdoor recreation programs to disadvantaged children and their families. Great cause.

In case you don't know this already, I spend ALOT of time online. I work from home, so whenever I have time I'm on Twitter, chatting with other people. I have circle of tweeple I became pretty close to, some don't even live in my city.

Having online friends used to suggest you didn't have many friends in real life. But now it's so accessible, REGULAR people communicate and make friends online too.

Still, I was feeling a bit shy about this Twestival-there have been bunch of Tweetups happening in Victoria in the last few months but I haven't been able to go to any of them. My hubby is away a lot for business, and having two kids(one is a baby)-you know, things happen.

So I asked my super outgoing friend Cathy to come along with me. Great thing about her is even if she doesn't do Twitter(I'm plotting to bring her into this world soon), when I asked her if she wanted to come to this Twitter event...she said SURE! I love open minded people.

I've got tickets for me and Cathy and we were all set-until unfortunately she had to cancel due to a mandatory meeting she had to attend...boo..

Now I was left with an extra ticket. What to do? Of course, I tweeted about it! Several people ReTweeted(RT) for me, and voila! I had a date for the night. This guy named Jason. We didn't know(follow) each other, but he's in Victoria, he is a movie critic. Cool. So I started following him.
(Of course, on Twitter...not literally...I don't have time to stalk people anyway)

I was a bit nervous to go to the event alone...but I'm a big girl, I can handle it. I left my kids with my hubby and off I went.

When I got there close to 8pm, there were lots of people mingling and music playing. Didn't recognize anybody at first, I went to line up for the bar(ya, I needed a drink!). Out came this gorgeous lady in black, she stopped me and said "Are you Yukari?!" That was @Jody_Nodes. She had this sassy wig and fabulous dress and accesories. She recently wrote a book about how to build your own website. Her friendlyness calmed me down and I was ready to mingle!

I chatted with @freshleafdesign-she makes this fantastic corsets for pillows-you have to see it-and it was great to finally meet @FootButterGuy. He owns Rockey Mountain Soap Company here in Victoria. I had some questions about "natural" body products shops and he answered my questions brilliantly. Thank you.

Met whole bunch of other interesting people-all the people I tweet with all the time, but it was so nice to actually meet and talk-there's no 140 letters limit here!!

Had an interesting conversation with @jordan_keats. Twitter is so great to get lots of info-but as a busy mom-and you know what, not just me, EVERYBODY is busy-sometimes I suffer from information overload-blogs to read, let alone writing your own, news to catch up, video you must watch, PSA to RT, etc etc...it is hard, if you want to promote something on Twitter, as it kinda gets buried in all the other people's posts. I do my best and "favourite" certain posts and TRY to get to them later, but sometimes that doesn't even happen. So how to reach people? Good question. We agreed how not to self-promo too much and instead giving-(we mutually follow @unmarketing so his name came up:) )is one of the ways.

I've been reading Malcom Gladwell. Right now I'm reading "Blnk"-so my brain is in "Gladwell mode"-it almost makes me wonder if there's a difference between blogs that get read and those not get read... there must be. Unfortunately I don't know the difference.

Anyhow, it was really great to finally meet everybody, and I would love to do this again!
Thank you so much for all the organizers who worked so hard on this event.