Jewish Social Media Shmooze

Schmoozing it up with Chaviva

This morning I attended my first ever social media event. It was at the JCC in Manhattan, and organized by the lovely Esti Berkowitz of PrimeTimeParenting, in conjunction with MetroImma where I am a featured blogger. Esti and I have been FB and Twitter pals for quite a while now, but finally met for the first time today. She rocks!! She put on such a wonderful event – so many sponsors, so much swag (which my KoD informs me stands for Something We All Get) (@kvetchingeditor says it should be “Schwag” as it was a Jewish event) and so much awesome networking! I met a lot of people that I had connected with online – it was great to be able to put a face and a real life personality to people!!  It was also great to meet some new people too.

Jessica Abo

Jessica Abo, anchor and reporter at NY1 news, was the keynote speaker and she blew us all away with remembering everyone’s name. She had us all tell the room a little bit about ourselves, and even at the end of the event she remembered names.

The panel consisted of my dear friend and soul sister Chaviva Galatz (@kvetchingeditor), Allen Ganz – the Abba of MetroImma, Rabbi Motti Seligson who represented Chabad extremely well, Dave Weinberg (@weinberg81) who is a mover and a shaker in this world of social media, Itamar Kestenbaum – Social Media Manager for Moishe’s Moving Systems and Lisa Grunberger, the author of Yiddish Yoga. They all spoke about how they use social media and what they have gained from it. The floor was opened to questions – but I felt that I had wanted there to be more time for more questions and more discussions.

Deborah Grayson Riegel

The last part of the morning was the honour of spending some time listening to Deborah Grayson Riegel who is a life coach with so much verve and charisma. Her son Jacob accompanied her to the event and almost stole the show! Deborah challenged us to come up with our own social media action plan – giving us 9 core questions whose answers will  guide us in figuring out what we want from social media and following through. Her motto is “success without tzuris” – I sure hope that I win her free coaching session!!

The world of social media is a vast one, the world of Jewish social media is much smaller – but it is getting bigger every day. Our challenge is how well we use the media tools available to us to get our personal message out. What our message is, well, that’s what we all need to figure out.

One thing that @kvetchingeditor and @schnit and I were talking about as we headed into NYC together, was that previously at similar social events if you were texting or on your laptop it was considered rude and anti-social of you. But now at these events if you aren’t tweeting by phone or laptop, well, there must be something wrong with you!!

Thank you all for a wonderful Sunday morning. Thank you to my KoD for driving me to meet my ride in to NYC, for washing the dishes this morning, for slaving over a hot stove making French toast for the kids, for keeping the kids entertained and safe, and for supporting me in all I do. Knowing that I could attend this event, and future events, with your blessing, my KoD, means the world to me.

Photos courtesy of MetroImma.