The Social Media Club was hosting educational presentations, Bryan Person of LiveWorld came down to start the Social Media Breakfast, and various Tweet-ups were cropping up as well. Having participated myself in all of these groups, they offer excellent content and opportunities. However, this deluge was starting to fatigue what was still a relatively close-knit group. What they decided to do was spearhead an integrated approach – continuing to host meetings at different times of day but with more centralized planning that would allow more people to decide what worked for them, rather than feeling a need to attend each different groups’ events.

From the outsider perspective, I noticed that people were very familiar with one another and very comfortable with the atmosphere. It was an easy going group, talking and mingling with one another. Even the people in for the Proctor and Gamble social marketing launch (still sorry we missed that) were having no trouble mixing in. We met some great people during that tweet-up including an interview with Robin Sloan of Current TV.

What are you doing to understand the unique needs of your audience or community in order to help you innovate?

1. Innovation isn’t always about creating something out of nothing, often it’s just a matter of listening and embracing something that’s already happening (re: integrating Twitter into Current’s Hack the Debate series).
2. Innovation is less about competition and more about cooperation.
3. CurrentTV sees the TV landscape in five years.

Edited by Colin to add: While CurrentTV is headquartered on the West coast, it is great to include Robin’s conversation on our tour because the concept for CurrentTV came from Al Gore – born and raised in Tennessee!