To continue the theme of social media bringing people together both in person and in online collaboration instead of driving them apart as some folks attest, I will present the following evidence to the former:

1. This week, I hosted our first local Tweetup (noun, A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.) here in Woodstock, GA where I live. We all have met virtually through Twitter and decided it was time to take it to another dimension, offline. We had 15 people show up and 1 little boy (belonging to a couple). There were people from all types of businesses and walks of life, engineers, marketing, real estate, software developers, web designers and even three guys from a company which sells the energy their company saves for retailers back to the energy companies. It was a remarkable mix and all of us were able to put faces with avatars. Some we recognized immediately and some we didn’t. It was a lot of fun and everyone left asking when the next one would happen. (more on Tweetups here http://tinyurl.com/d7774d)    

2. I found out about a new business being started by two guys I know from the Tweet Chat http://www.sbbuzz.biz I attend each Tuesday night from 8 to 10 pm ET. Bradford Shimp (@bradfordshimp) and Neal Rohrbach (@nrohrbach) have decided to get together and start http://www.ideaanglers.com. They have worked for weeks online to coordinate and put together a website and business plan. Through a series of tweets, it went from a germ of an idea, to a domain name being registered, to an ongoing collaboration and a business being formed. Pretty amazing stuff for a medium people say will drive us all apart. (Press Release here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfr5mrzb_3d7gfbjgw)    

3. I was invited by Aronado Placencia (@aronado) from http://www.startuplucky.com to talk about internet marketing and all things social media on his live internet show this week. My PR gal, Rebekah Lovell (@renown) who I met via Twitter and who also lives in Woodstock, GA set this up for me. Now @aronado will be on my own podcast and we’ll collaborate on a blog post together in the future because of this online meeting. Heck, I might even go see him in Colorado if invited so we can do the show live in the same room! (Wouldn’t that be interesting?) This opportunity to collaborate was simply because Rebekah was able to find him and reach out via Twitter.

These are great examples of how social media put people together who might have never met otherwise. I would love to hear more examples. Please share your experiences with all of us in the comments below.