The Bay Area Internet Marketer’s Meetup is one year old this month so we’re celebrating with a birthday party! Come join us from 6 until 8 PM! NOTE the earlier start time.
Winemaker Paul Kreider of The Ross Valley Winery will be hosting a wine tasting event at our celebration. The Ross Valley Winery is located in downtown San Anselmo and Paul has been making award winning wines for over 20 years. Stop in and have a glass of wine with Paul at the winery on San Anselmo Avenue. Paul’s website is www.rossvalleywinery.com.
Dominique Lahaix, the Founder and CEO of eCairn, will be our special guest. Dominique will be showing us how to leverage the power of social conversations and turn those conversations into paying clients for your business. He’ll show us how he finds the right conversations to tap into using his powerful eCairn application.
Dominique is the Founder and Ceo of eCairn, a software company based in Silicon Valley, delivering an innovative social media marketing platform to agencies and marketing groups. He has previously founded and managed a software startup specializing in emailing optimization with clients like eBay, HP, Apple. Before, He has lead several organizations in Hewlett Packard Services (R&D, Consulting and Business Dev) and has 20 years of expertise in managing Technology organizations. He has published, lectured on IT strategy and KM.


Check out the Smithsonian images on Flickr at 
Social Media is just an excuse…
It’s true. Social Media is just an excuse for us to justify our aimlessly surfing the internet for hours and hours. I’m convinced its a conspiracy by those who want us to waste as much time as we can so we can go days without accomplishing anything.
I keep hearing from Social Media experts that you build your credibility and find new clients by commenting on other people’s blogs and forums. You start out by doing a Google Blog Search forkeywords related to your niche. Next you dig through the search results to find related blogs. Before you know it you’ve spent an hour sampling other blogs looking for something to comment on.
Finally you find a good blog and make your comment. Then back to the Google search results to find more related sites. You find a good article on one site and make a comment. That article leads you to another great site with relevant content. You spend an hour or so reading articles on that wesite which leads you to more articles on another blog. You make some comments on that blog which leads you to another blog from someone’s comment.
And then you realize you just spent 2 hours reading and commenting on blogs and news sites. Next you log into your Facebook account to see what your friends are up to. Your inbox is filled with messages from your "friends" who posted self promotions on your wall. Facebook is getting worse than the spam in your inbox. You get distracted playing on Facebook for a couple of hours and you realize you forgot to eat lunch.
After lunch you check your email and find more messages from friends. You spend 20 minutes deleting those messages and you’re Google Alert notifies you of a new blog post. You jump on that blog to make the first comment and spend another hour reading other blogs.
Does this sound familiar? It has to be a conspiracy but I haven’t figured out their motive other than to make us waste our time.