Daniel Johnson, Jr.

In a recent interview I was asked if I was unwilling to promote other networking groups. It would seem some are under the impression that only a select can create community events.

The case for more local community networking groups

Now, if you’re active in the social media community in Cincinnati, you might be tempted to think that we’re reaching saturation and that the community cannot handle any more networking groups.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I love the stories that data tell, so let’s look at some data.

Consider this, via Wikipedia:

According to a 2008 Census Bureau estimate, the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area had a population of 2,155,137 making it the largest MSA in Ohio, and the 24th most populous in the United States.

That’s 2.1 million people.

Now let’s look at some data for the New Media Cincinnati social media networking group that we created in October 2007. I’m most familiar with this group, and as such will not comment on others.

• Second Saturday attendance. In January 2010 we had the largest ever attendance at a Second Saturday event: 70. That’s 0.032% of the population of the Greater Cincinnati area!
• LinkedIn group members. At the moment there are 339 members of the New Media Cincinnati LinkedIn group, or 0.016% of the metropolitan area. That number probably should be adjusted downward because there are people from outside of the Cincinnati area who are part of the group.
• Twitter followers. At the time of this writing, there are 2303 followers of @newmediacincy on Twitter, or 0.107% of the population. That number also needs to be adjusted downward because there are a number of duplicate Twitter accounts and many outside of the Cincinnati area who follow the news about the group.
• Facebook fans. I just checked, and there are 308 fans of New Media Cincinnati on Facebook, or 0.104% of the area’s population.

Understandably, many of the population will never be interested in what New Media Cincinnati is doing to get involved. Even so, these numbers show that we’ve only barely scratched the surface in reaching the Greater Cincinnati community.

It’s time to stop swimming around in the fishbowl and look outside of it. Or build another onramp so that more people can come in and join us.

We need more training groups, workshops, more bootcamps, more unconferences, more tweetups, more networking events so that people can understand how to use social networking tools effectively.

No one group is capable of meeting everyone’s needs. And every one of these groups needs volunteers who can help make things happen.

It’s time for you to step up and do something.

Related link: Being Active in the Community by Jennifer Navarrete

Tags: Cincinnati – Northern Kentucky metropolitan area, Community, Greater Cincinnati, networking, newmediacincy, social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 5:59 pm and is filed under cincinnati, Community, Featured, lessons learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.