Or at least the social media breakfast capital of the world? It felt like it Friday, as a mob of people began gathering bright and early, with the smell of bacon and eggs wafting above the expansive lawn at Deluxe Corporation’s headquarters in Shoreview, MN.  The scene was the 16th consecutive monthly meeting of an organization called Social Media Breakfast-Twin Cities, or “SMBmsp” for short.   Complete with a “Jumbotron” on wheels for the presenters’s slides, the event was unofficially dubbed “Social Media Palooza” by the sponsor, and beach balls were even bouncing from row to row before the morning was over.

The event was originally slated to be held indoors at Deluxe, but free tickets for the 125-person capacity room sold out on the group’s online sign-up site within two hours. So, organizer Rick Mahn and sponsor PartnerUp (a Deluxe company) scrambled to accommodate demand. They quickly decided to open up the event by holding it outside, and then promptly sold out all 250 tickets. 

Just what is a “Social Media Breakfast”?  As explained on the group’s web site (a social networking site, of course!): “It’s where folks get together to talk about using social media and social networking tools in their business or careers. It’s about networking, it’s about learning, and mostly it’s about people.”

The SMB concept has taken off nationally, now with 25 chapters. But in early 2008 the Twin Cities group was one of the first to get started — the third, actually, after Boston and New York City, according to Bryon Person, the founder of Social Media Breakfast. Person spoke at the local “SMPmsp 15” event at Concordia College in St. Paul on May 16. (Person is based in Austin, TX and is a blogger, podcaster, speaker, and social media evangelist for LiveWorld. He is @BryanPerson on Twitter.)  Person also said the Twin Cities SMB group has held the most meetings of all the chapters, and consistently has the biggest attendance.  Thus, one could conclude that Friday’s outdoor event was the biggest SMB breakest ever held nationally, since attendance was about twice that of the largest previous SMBmsp event. …  [Read More…]