Dave Woodson, photo courtesy of AroundIndy.com
Recently I attended the Indiana Social Media Summit that was put on by Amy Stark with the help of a bunch of volunteers. The event was held at Scotty’s Brewhouse up on the north side of Indy on Dec 30th at 1PM (Indy time.)
Now if you were wondering why this might be of interest to ValpoLife community, I (a Valpo resident) was nominated for the award Indiana’s Nicest Social Media Peep as well as Dave Woodson, the man behind the NWITweetups recently, who was nominated for Most Influential Dame...I mean Dude. For anyone that is aware of my existence, you will be able to spot some of the humor in this contest by the fact that I’m nominated for anything nice.
We both went down to Indy to represent the NWI community (I’m sorry NWI) and I think we did pretty well by winning both of our awards and bringing home 2 of the 6 total awards for NWI. We were also the only 2 winners that were on site to accept their awards which also says a lot. It’s kind of weird winning an award in front of a bunch of people who did not vote for you (of 60 in room 3 voted for me) but just shows the large influence we have outside of the Indy community. Of note, I have the smallest number of twitter followers of anyone nominated and many have 6-10k followers which says a lot for what the true influence of the community is down in Indy.
Richard Orelup, photo courtesy of AroundIndy.com
While overall the awards themselves are more of a joke and about having fun in general, I still gained a lot of insight into the Indy Social Media community as a whole. As always, the NWI guys are the ones closing the event down. I also got to see how open our local community is to new people and outsiders when compared to others. We have a great group of people up here who can really support one another and help each other out while yet not being an inclusive elitist clique that is impervious to outsiders. I’m glad I could see how people are in other areas to really help give myself a new perspective on our local group.
You can see a recording of the event that 12 Stars Media put together and broadcast live on Ustream where you can laugh at us both as we wear our tiara’s with pride.
Thanks to all that supported us and hopefully next year we can have a few more NWI peeps in the race, as well as other locations outside of Indy, and really embrace this event as a statewide event.