Photo by Brian Solis
My name is Adam Jackson and I am a party addict. I’m not referring to the parties we all attended in college but the parties where you talk about startups and swap business cards.
I moved to San Francisco only five months ago. The night I touched down at SFO, I was immediately off to a Laughing Squid drinkup. Now, attending tech parties has been a daily ritual since arriving in the city and now I attend 1-4 parties a night.
How does an individual find these tech parties?
First of all I spend the first hour of each day scouring a few event lists in an attempt to find parties and then they’re added to my calendar. The reason I put everything in my calendar is because simply RSVPing to an event via Facebook and Upcoming requires that I visit both websites and it’s easy double book yourself without a centralized schedule.
Here are the event lists that I check daily.
- Upcoming
- Gary’s Guide
- Going.com
- Yelp Events
- The Squid List
- Meetup
- Eventful
- Valleywag Calendar
- Mashable | Upcoming Conferences
As you’re probably realizing, this process is incredibly time consuming and any person whose primary role is to attend tech events will not spend an hour a day scanning each of these sites. Here are some tips that will make things a little easier.
- Visit Robert Scoble’s Upcoming.org Page (link). He RSVPs to nearly every event on Upcoming that is tech related and you’ll see most events via his page. It’s a great resource.
- Become friends with Andrew Mager (link). Andrew is another “party guy” and browsing his status updates will show his public RSVPs to many bay area tech events that are on Facebook. There will be overlap with events that are on Upcoming but you won’t miss anything this way.
- Subscribe to Social Calendario (link). This is a website that I have operated for the past few months. Instead of posting things to my private calendar, they all go here. I post meetups, parties and conferences to this page.
Nothing compares to simple grunt work, but if you’re just getting started in the tech space, it’s valuable to have a helping hand. Pretty soon, you’ll get more invites to lists than you can handle. Deciding between two events that are equally as awesome is a tough decision to make but it’s better than missing a really good party that you didn’t know about.
Social networking has enabled us to connect with like minded individuals across the globe but nothing compares to face to face networking you’ll get at a tech event. These events are happening everywhere and the sites I listed above can help you find them.
Since moving to San Francisco and attending these parties, my workload and client base has doubled, I’ve seen growth in Twitter followers and traffic to my blogs. It’s important that every startup have a representative that attends these events and if you’re a freelance graphic artist, marketer or blogger, it’s also important that you are seen and connect with people at these events.
The payout is enormous compared to an email or reply on Twitter.
Adam Jackson has been dubbed, “the party guy” and frequently attends tech parties. He is a social media marketer and has a few various projects in the works including a book. You can find more about Adam on Twitter, Flickr and on his website.