The third annual St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival is coming up. Across from the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, the festival will run on June 5th and 6th with three sessions.

St. Louis is Beer Capital USA and this event will show case that history and heritage. Over 60 styles of beer will be available to sample along with foods from several of the areas most unique restaurants.

Beyond raising awareness of St. Louis’s brewing culture, the event doubles as a fundraiser for Lift For Life.

To tie this in with the theme of my blog, I’d like to talk about the Heritage Festival site regarding how it works. The site is well designed with no broken features or tricky behaviors. On the flip side, there is no real interactive side to the site.

Information is presented in straightforward text and images with no level of interaction other than navigating between the screens of information. In a few cases there are links that are not underlined, bolded or otherwise noted.

Unfortunately a good bit of the text is not presented as text but as part of an image. This prevents copying or deep linking, thus minimizing the easy of blogging about it or passing tidbits on.

As a follow up comment to that, there is no plain text version of the site for those that would prefer not to deal with the fancy graphics.

My conclusion is that the site is beautiful and works for what it is. However, a wee bit of interaction would greatly increase the draw to return visitors and increase the time users spend on the site.

All that aside, this is my type of event. See you there.

Todd
@tojosan on Twitter

So it just goes to show that if you can’t go to St. Louis, the people will still come out.  That’s right, our second Tweetup in St. Charles county area was a success.  Before you read my take on it though, I’d like you to read Jeff’’s Tweetup post.

Back? Great.

As Tweetups go, this was a great crowd.  We had both techies and non-techies, men and women, and the mix worked well.  The conversation wasn’t just stuck on the latest Twitter tool or tech tip.

Lisa, @StL4Closeures, talked to us about real estate and politics.  Karen, @KarenStL, talked about her recent networking experience at BarCampStL.  Sharon, my wife, jump in and talked about being a parent and bus driver.  It was one busy table.

The location turned out to be busy but well liked.  Trailhead Brewery is located on the St. Charles waterfront area, in the historic area of town.  Trailhead provides a fun and warm atmosphere for getting together, as well as a great selection of microbrew beers.

All these elements made this an above average experience.  How do I judge that? I judge it by the relationship impact.  Huh? Yes, it’s about relationships.

Out of this Tweetup, Jeff, @jpickell, met, Chris, @idonotes, and others that he’d only known via Twitter.  They really hit it off, and I see collaboration coming for those two.  That’s just one example of how real face to face time can be a plus.

What did I learn? On a practical level, I learned to plan the location better, but knowing what circumstance might affect it.  It turned out they were packed due to activities on Main Street.

On a social networking level, I learned that word of Twitter, though fast, isn’t always efficient. I used simple broadcasting to my followers to alert folks of the Tweetup.  This proved less than fully effective.  Where I saw the response was in people that follow me and few others right now.  The more active involved folks on my stream missed the message altogether.

Feedback I received indicates that a more direct and targeted approach would work better.  This would include as much advance notification as possible with an effort to reach as many relevant individuals as possible. Aiding this would be the fact that I keep a group column in Tweetdeck just for tweets by locals.

Another lesson was that not everyone is equally interested.  Some will respond online and honestly be fully committed. Others will reply and not really plan on turning up.  The rest will ignore the offer like it was never heard.   The key is to not worry about the head count but about encouraging folks to come with the intent to add value.

On that last point, and my final one, adding value isn’t about being the most knowledgeable about Twitter, social networks, or Web 2.0.  Bringing value to the table is about your willingness to join the conversation, form relationships, and get over your fears.

Luckily the best way to get practice at these things is to show up to more and more similar functions.  Cheers to those that do.

I look forward to seeing you at an event near you in the future.