I don’t often write about local events, but I attended a cool one last night. It was quite possibly the birth of a new social media force in my part of the country.

I attended the inaugural Social Media Meetup in Fredericton, New Brunswick. There were at least 30 people in attendance from the Fredericton area (Fredericton is the capital of the Canadian province of New Brunswick.) The Meetup (inspired by the Third Tuesday social media meet-ups happening in other parts of Canada, and similar groups in other parts of the world) was organized by Fredericton entrepreneur and social media enthusiast Lisa Rousseau, with organizational assistance and sponsorship from the rising stars of Radian6 (did you know they were based in Fredericton?)

The highlight of the evening was a talk led by Jason Falls (aka Social Media Explorer), a talented and witty blogger/PR guy based in Louisville, KY.  Jason wrote a blog post about the meet up to give you another perspective on last night’s events.

For my part, I got to meet some great people and talk about blogging, social media, and other things of interest to me of late.  I had a quick chat with Jason Falls and was pleased to discover that he’d seen this avatar before:

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It was a pleasure to meet people like Lisa, David Alston, Tim Tozer, Chaffic Hadad, Marcel Lebrun, Carman Pirie, Brian Dunphy, Gary Stairs, Reuben Deil, and other people whose names I can’t associate with a face at the moment. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to talk to everyone last night, but all in all I’d say it’s a great group of people.

Speaking of associating a name with a face, this is my actual photo (in case anyone from the Meetup doesn’t remember meeting a guy with blueish skin and a glowing green brain):

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I also won a free copy of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s guide to the New Social Media by Paul Gillin. Kids: sometimes it pays to ask questions in class!

Also, I should mention that the participants gathered some donations to support the Frozen Pea fund.

The Frozen Pea fund is raising money for breast cancer in Susan Reynold’s name

To close, if anyone from last night’s event is reading today, then: hello! Thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we’ll meet up again soon.

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