My First Austin Tweet Up

Organized my first Austin Tweet Up tonight.

Tweet Up?

It's when a bunch of us who have become friends on Twitter get together and chat in person by using much more than 140 characters at a time. Not only do we chat, but we post micro-blogs on Twitter as we go, we Utterz about it live and take a ton of photos that we rush home to upload on sites like Flickr. We're a bunch of geeks. Really we are.

We also do all kinds of things in our professional lives like Kay who works on taxes, Richard who works on Social Media for Dell, Connie who does tons of PR for lots of companies, Kara who blogs and freelances, David who works for the American Cancer Society, Bryan who podcasts and works with Monster, Susan who freelances and is a fabulous artist, Aruni who runs her own company Babble Soft, Thom who works for VCFO and is an accomplished, Lani and Benn who are incredible interactive realtors, Mike who works for a biomedical type of company and travels all over the world and me HR Manager for an interactive lead marketing firm. Whew!

And we all got together tonight because Bryan was in town from Boston and Susan was in town from Washington, D.C. How could we not get together?

I heard it was going to be a beautiful Central Texas evening, so I planned the event and publicized it on Event Brite and had everyone meet at Waterloo Ice House on Capital of Texas Highway. I love taking folks on Capital of Texas Highway also known as Loop 360. It's absolutely breathtaking!

We had such a great time and the conversations never skipped a beat. Susan commented that she wanted to listen to nine conversations at once. It's tough when you put that many folks that have so much to say in one location.

And within 30 minutes from our departure the photos started popping up and more conversations about conversations began being blogged. Fun stuff. Wish you could have joined us.

Austin Tweetup

Pictured is @conniereece and @susanreynolds

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Social Media Club Breakfast Austin

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Real Life Collides with Online Life

Social networking and media have recently become more and more real to me as I've been having more human interactions with folks that I've become friends with on various social networks. The two have collided.

This afternoon as I logged into my Twitter account I found that I was invited to attend a Social Media Breakfast here in Austin this week. Just after registering to attend I had a call come through on ooVoo from Geoff Livingston in D.C. I clicked on, plugged in my webcam and for the first time had a conversation with Geoff, Jay Moonah, Joseph Jaffee, and Robin Good - - two guys here in the states, one guy in Toronto, one guy in Rome and little 'ol me in Central Texas.

A year ago it would have never crossed my mind that I would be having conversations of any kind with folks like this and that they would be from all over the world. But today, it's becoming more and more normal. In addition to this afternoon's chat I also caught up with my CMO in Belgium and an old friend in Argentina earlier this week. Amazing.

My boyfriend has been chatting with his social friends online for years now - again coming from all over the world. Of course his conversations are never around media, marketing and the effects of social media though.

My organization, Bulldog Solutions, is constantly trying to help our Business-to-Business (B2B) clients find better ways to reach their clients on social networks and media and the simple truth is that it begins with a conversation. First they have to determine where their customers live and then begin interacting with them there. And by interacting we know it's not pushing more advertisements at them, but really interacting - posing questions, offering helpful insight and opening up about what's going on at an organizational level and becoming more personal and interesting.

I have to believe in my own experiences that although it might take us a while to teach our clients how to evolve in this new social world that their efforts will pay off exponentially.

@SheilaS speaking this AM

Wanna listen in? DM me on Twitter for info.

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Let the hiring begin

I've been in the HR / Recruiting world for going on close to a decade now and one of the things I know is the fourth quarter of any year is generally not the time for huge hiring sprees. Then when the calendar flips to January the frenzy begins.

That's exactly where I find myself these days. With awards like this it's not surprising that Bulldog Solutions is about to undergo tremendous growth, yet again! Do you have what it takes to be a Bulldog?

2006 Listed as one of the Top 50 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies by the Austin Business Journal

2007 Listed as one of the Top 50 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies by the Austin Business Journal

2007 Listed as one of the Inc 500s Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies

2007 Listed as one of the Best Companies to Work for in Texas

And now . . . I'm in need (or soon will be in need) of the following:

• Event Manager - In essence a DJ for our clients Webinars. Folks with 2-3 years of professional experience and RTF degrees usually fit well in this positions.
  
• Account Director - The bridge between our sales department and our project campaign managers. We're looking for folks with 5-7 years of strategic marketing experience. Interactive advertising / marketing a huge plus.
  
• Web Production Developer - HTML proficient and graphic / design background who is comfortable with an incredibly fast-paced work environment and is fanatical about quality.
  
• Campaign Manager - If you've led campaigns for the Democratic or Republic party goody for you, but this title is all about project managing our client events and marketing objectives.

There will be more listed very soon so if you're in the job market, if you know someone in the job market, if you live in Austin or can't wait to get here, then bookmark this page or subscribe to my RSS feed.

Oh, and you have to like working with dogs. I'm not saying our employees are dogs, we actually allow our employees to bring their well-behaved dogs to work with them.