Meet up.com is the world�s largest community of local meetings. What does that mean? If
you are somewhere and you want a local group of people meeting in person on anything from
photography to SEO and traffic through to business, meetup.com is the place to find
them. Today I want to focus on my website and give a little bit of a difference. This
particular website is all about things you do off line. It�s, from what I can tell,
perhaps the largest global online network of meetings that people are having in person.
These are actual real humans getting together in a real actual place, which is very weird
for the online world. I�m constantly amazed that people don�t know about this insanely
powerful tool. So let�s have a little look about how this works. This is Meetup.com and,
as you can see, it defaults by knowing where I am and it says, �Hey, listen. What are
some meetups that are happening within 5 miles of Austin, Texas, where I happen to be located,
in the next little while. And all I have to is pop in a keyword and it�ll search for
different events that are going on in an area of my choice. But let�s just configure this
a little bit to be more relevant. Let�s say I wasn�t in Austin, Texas. Let�s say
I was in New York. So I just type in �New York,� in this case �New York, US.�
There we go. And let�s say I�m prepared to look within 10 miles of New York. Terrific.
And let�s say I�m interested in photography. Once I punch in photography, it starts to
lay out for me all of the different photography meetings in New York at the moment. And you
can see, in this case this is one called Learn Street Photography. Well, there are 2300 odd
people already doing this and their next meetup is December 7. This one, Drawing the Light
� Photography and Lighting workshops, 1500 people. Let me change the sorting from �Best
Match� to �Most Members.� Look at this one. I wanted to do that. . .Just not alone!!
That�s a group, I guess. Let�s have a look in the detail here, but it�s 9,000
some people and they�re meeting up, some of them, tomorrow. So let�s look at the
detail. I�m gonna right click, open that page in a new tab and just go to that tab.
Well, here is the page for that group. Here you are, the mission of the group, exactly
what the name implies, good company, positive atmosphere, you experience things that you
would like to do more and in a group. And you can see there are 9,700 people in this
thing and it�s been reviewed 244 times. This is one of the most substantial groups
I think I�ve ever seen and they�ve got 9 events upcoming already booked and they�ve
done 800 before. A very substantial event. Joining it, by the way, and joining Meetup
is free. All you do is click there. It says �Join us� and they�ll let you into their
group and it�s as easy as saying then that you want to attend a meeting. In this case
you can see they�re about to do a fun run, about 3 people attending that. It�s not
a lot. Here is a free after-work mixer/fashion show, 43 people going along to that and so
on and so forth. And over here, on the right-hand side you can see some of the people who are
actually showing up, the people that you get to meet if you turn up there. And you can
see over here some other meetups these people are in. So it�s as simple as finding a meetup
and joining the meetup and attending an event. Why is that such a powerful thing? Well, it
turns out that this is a great place to find new people, not just for social reasons, but
for business reasons too. For example, what would happen if you wanted to learn a lot
about Internet marketing in the New York area? Let�s type in SEO and see what happens.
Well there you have it. There are quite a few SEO groups in the New York area, Internet
Marketers of New York, New York Internet Marketers, Content Strategy NYC and on and on and on
it goes. Let�s have a little look at this one. I�m right clicking. I�m just checking
out some of these. Internet Marketers of New York, 1700 odd people, 25 reviews, 51 past
meetups, they talk about blogging and search engine ranking and all kinds of fun stuff
like that. And you can see they have no upcoming events because it�s the end of the year.
But let�s look at a recent meetup. Let me right click and have a look at this event.
You can see they ask for 10 bucks for beer and wine and then they looked into all these
traffic things. You can see all the feedback from all these people who attended and this
is a list of all the people who attended that you can get in touch with. In this case, how
many people showed up? Looks like 72 people attended. So if you want to get into a room
with 72 expert in Internet marketing in New York, this is how you can do it. But what
if you�re not in New York? Well, again all you need to do is type in on that very front
page where you happen to be and how far you�re willing to travel and whether it�s SEO or
maybe you want to join a writing group or talk with some authors. Here you are. The
9/12 Project, a screenwriters collective and on and on it goes. Let�s pick somewhere
that isn�t New York though, somewhere that�s a smaller town. Let�s talk about, San Francisco�s
still a big town, let�s talk about Saratoga which is a little town north of San Francisco.
Not a huge town, even there you can see, look at this, Silicon Valley Bloggers and Writers,
763 people. There are so many people making use of this site to gather and share and connect
in a community. It certainly doesn�t have to be something business oriented. You can
see cars, paranormal activities, LGPT (I have no idea what that stands for), fashion, technology,
science fiction, dating, movies and film. There are just so many different things in
this massive online community and here�s the kicker. If you don�t find something,
for example, you wanted to do milk drinking, which I can�t imagine, in this case let�s
say that there�s no real milk drinking group. You can, of course, start your own. You sign
up. You pay, I think, an annual fee if you want to start a meetup, otherwise it�s free.
I think it�s about $30, and you can run your own meetup of your own topic bringing
people to your meetups as you go. By the way, when you do that, Meetup is kind enough to
send out emails to people in the local area saying, �Hey! A new group has started up
focusing on something that you�ve indicated you�re interested in [in this case milk
drinking]. Come along and see what it�s like.� So Meetup.com, a massive resource.
Let�s just say one other really quick scenario. Let�s say you�re travelling. I showed
up in Atlanta a couple of months ago when I was on a speaking gig. I was on a speaking
tour. I had a couple of days free, thought I might like to do something with art. So
I just typed in �art� and you can see here I�ve got fashion, I�ve got photography,
I�ve got movies, and I just picked one, I think in this case I picked something about
painting. But here I am, Arts and Culture, joined the group and went to a meetup that
very night. So it�s a terrific social network. It�s a terrific business network. It�s
just a great way to meet great people. I�ve had nothing but good results with Meetup.com.