Get Connected with the Web User Groups in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area

Categories: Events, Web IndustryPosted on June 2nd, 2007

I’m often asked how one can get super connected and get to know a lot of folks. For me, I started to attend every web group and meeting that I could, from 2006 to now. While my co-workers didn’t understand why I did it, It paid off in spades. Of course, I want to see you succeed and meet other birds of a feather, so I’ll construct this list.

The bay area is an amazing place for technology meetups, there’s about 4 tech related events, workshops or mixers almost every night. What’s even more interesting as this group even extends to social events on the weekends, it’s a true community

Requirements: This must be for the Web or web-related industry. As a web strategist, the concept of marketing and PR are certainly relevant. This must be an ongoing and regular meeting group, likely it has a charter, and organizer, and supporting website. Often they have job and networking opportunities. This is not an annual conference, these are on-going events on a frequent basis.

Web User Groups in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area
Please leave a comment below if you want me to modify or edit the list.

Internet Strategy Forum, Silicon Valley & San Francisco
Web Strategy, Web Management, Web Marketing

SF Bay Area Web Site Management & Marketing Meetup
Web Strategy, Web Management, Web Marketing

Bay Area Internet Marketing Strategy Meetup
Web Strategy, Web Management, Web Marketing

American Marketing Association
Web Marketing, Communications

Social Media Club: SF and Silicon Valley
Social Media, PR, Communitacions

Lunch 2.0
Community, Web Development

Web Guild Silicon Valley
Software Engineering, User Experience, Markeinting, Management, Search Marketing

Silicon Valley Web Builders
Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Design, Web Analytics, User Experience, Usability, Information Architecture, Search Engines, Web Audio, Video Production, Web Tools, Web Hosting

STIRR
Entrepreneur, Start-up, VC

SVASE
Entrepreneur, Start-up, VC

Web Analytics Wednesday - Menlo Park - Yahoo Group
Web Analytics

Third Thursday
Social Media, Marketing, PR

Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup Group
Web 2.0, Development, Design

BayCHI
Computer-Human Interaction, User Experience, Design

Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) Group
Semantic Web

SF Beta
Start-up, entrepreneur

The Palo Alto Search Engine Optimization Meetup Group
Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

SF New Tech Meetup
Startup, Nanotech, Digital Content, Video Games, Demos

Churchhill Club
Startup, leadership, executive, technology, entrepreneurship, life sciences, business leadership, innovation

Business Association of the Stanford Engineering Student
Startup, Engineering, Entrepreneur

Fountain Blue
clean energy, high tech,, life science, entrepreneurs, executives, women leaders.

WebGrrls
Women, professional, business, careers, web

Social Media Club
Social Media, brands, usergroups

Finding Future events: I recommend that all group organizers put their events on upcoming, zvents, and meetup, so we can find out what events are coming up, and more importantly, who’s attending. (And if you’re not doing this as an internet marketing group, shame on you!)

To any of the organizers of these events: Please include me on your ‘media’ list, I’d love to come cover the event, record it, do interviews, moderate a panel, or even speak on social media (see my profile to learn more).

In case you can’t tell, I write posts that are intended to be resources for the community, feel free to leave comments and suggestions to add.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 6:49 am and is filed under Events, Web Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Silicon Valley Web Builder (SVWB)http://www.svwebbuilder.com
Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Design, Web Analytics, User Experience & Usability, Information Architecture, Search Engines, Web Audio & Video Production, Web Tools, Web Hosting

We focus on listing our events on upcoming.org, sometime zvents, and other listings.

We welcome press member(s) to register and attend our meetings. We didn’t add our past speaking press members to any list.

I like your idea. I will create a media list and start inviting press members.

Anything else I should do? How do I gather a list of press members to invite to the media list? Please advise.

Posted by Bess on June 3rd, 2007 at 2:37 am

Bess

I had you on the list already! But I did add those additional keywords.

Another thing to consider is to adding media (audio and video) to every event.

Make sure someone is recording the event and uploading. whether it’s usreaming, podcasting, or blogging.

Lastly, make sure you let the community sometimes dictate the topics that happen in future events, successful companies and events know how to listen.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 3rd, 2007 at 7:13 am

Jeremiah,

A quick update…

The Internet Strategy Forum recently decided to split our Bay area activity up into separate chapters for both San Francisco and Silicon Valley to make it more convenient for members.

Since our monthly meetings are members-only we don’t post location details to the Web, so those who are interested should check out our site and apply for membership at http://www.internetstrategyforum.org/members.

Posted by Steve Gehlen on June 3rd, 2007 at 11:12 am

Steve, I’ve updated the text to list both Silicon Valley and San Francisco

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 3rd, 2007 at 11:21 am

Thanks for the info. I am gathering input from our members and users on future speakers and possible interests. However, we don’t have luck sometimes on inviting certain speakers and companies. I get rejections all the times. At least I tried. Speakers we invited are the speakers accepted our invitation and available to us without charging us speaker fee and asking for travel expenses.

Please advise us on how to get press members on a media list. Do I go to organization to get a press member list? Or I have to make contact to press member on one-on-one basis?

Posted by Bess on June 4th, 2007 at 12:47 am

you may already be covering that group of ‘press’. by inviting bloggers, podcasts and video bloggers

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 4th, 2007 at 7:01 am

[...] I’m getting closer to 100 MPH, it’s 4:30 am and I’ve been up doing my work, preparing for presentations etc. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Approaching 95 miles per hour on June 5th, 2007 at 4:35 am

[...] The Web Guild has been around for quite a long time in the silicon valley, it’s one of the groups that I put on my list of web user groups in the San Francisco Bay area –there’s an event resource just about every night. How to get a discount for Searchnomics and Web Guild: [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Attention Internet Marketers: Searchnomics conference on July 27th in Santa Clara on June 18th, 2007 at 5:33 pm

[...] also recommend that startups consider joining many of the local user groups in Silicon Valley, see this list of over 16 user groups. There’s an endless opportunity pool for meeting folks that will be your customers, your [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Community Events for Startups on July 30th, 2007 at 3:01 am

What about the SF NewTech MeetUp? Dealmaker? Churchill Club?

Posted by francine hardaway on July 30th, 2007 at 11:42 am

Thanks Francine, you’re a big help, I’ve added those two.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 30th, 2007 at 1:04 pm

How about the SDForum, the Stanford/MIT Venture Lab, and (some) various chapters of the IEEE and ACM (besides SIGCHI)?

Also, each Monday the business section of the Merc publishes a listing of business meetings scheduled for that week. Not a perfect listing, but not bad, either.

BTW, the Churchill Club publishes (or published) a list of related events held each month. Since I’ve been living in China for the past 3 1/2 years, my info might be a bit dated, but I was a member through the 2003-2004 “season” and they published it back then. (BTW, my Merc might be outdated, too.)

Posted by David Scott Lewis on July 30th, 2007 at 5:26 pm

David

Could you provide some URLs to help me out here?

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 30th, 2007 at 8:28 pm

[...] you’re in search of a user group in Silicon Valley and SF, I have this growing list of groups to join. Hope to see you around the [...]

Posted by Upcoming Events on August 15th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

[...] Jay Adelson, Digg.com, Dan Gillmor, Center For Citizen Media. Amy Dalton told me that this list of Silicon Valley events was very helpful for her planning. “Social News Aggregators offer individuals more than a [...]

Posted by Social News Aggregation delivers bottom up news, and all the challenges that comes with it on August 27th, 2007 at 8:18 am

[...] Next week is Nokia’s mobile mashup event on Thursday, although my schedule is filling up, I’ll try to swing by. The problem with living in the valley is that there are just too many events. Exactly how many? I started this list of just ongoing events in the valley. [...]

Posted by Upcoming Events: Play, Visible Path, Nokia’s Mobile Mashup on October 27th, 2007 at 3:03 am

Home…

{}Stuff I Haven’t Had a Chance to Organize Yet: Lists: Wikipedia: Comparison of Internet Forum Software…

Posted by Confluence: Ei-Lun Tsai on December 29th, 2007 at 2:24 am

[...] find me, (and my presentations) over the rest of Jan, and all of Feb. This excludes any ongoing Silicon Valley events (is this updated?) that I may attend. Web 2.0 Marketing: What’s Real and What’s Hype (Microsoft/MarketingProfs | [...]

Posted by Upcoming Events on January 24th, 2008 at 6:26 am

Hi Jeremiah,

Here are the Meetup links for the SF New Tech Meetup and the SV New Tech Meetup:

http://newtech.meetup.com/15/

http://newtech.meetup.com/14/ (newtechmeetup.org)

Posted by Victoria on January 24th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

Victoria

How is this different to the other group I’ve listed with the same name?

This is very confusing.

The SiliconValley NewTech Meetup Group

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 25th, 2008 at 4:57 am

[...] Silicon Valley: 3 tech events every day I also talked to a colleague and I told her that there was about 3 tech events every weekday in Silicon Valley, you can hunt through Upcoming.org, or see this list of local user groups in Silicon Valley that regularly meet. [...]

Posted by Silicon Valley is getting busy on February 7th, 2008 at 7:04 am

The reason why those chapters should have their information on a site like upcoming is simple:

Somebody like myself does plan their travel accordingly and when I have another trip to the US, the listing of events in upcoming determines how much longer I stay or earlier I arrive.

As do many other travellers. While we may not be as interesting as local companies, we are very often individuals who are not working as a company, but working for other publications or blogs (to answer @bess questions about how to get better media attention - make use of other peoples reach).

To Steve: It does not matter that they are members-only - or don’t you want to have more members? Sites like upcoming are about discovering as well.

And thanks Jeremiah, now I have some more things I can check out for my next trip in April.

Posted by Nicole Simon on February 7th, 2008 at 7:11 am

great useful list! thanks

Posted by susan mernit on February 7th, 2008 at 7:16 am

Here are a few more local calendars for business and technical events, each with a slightly different spin.

WorkIt.com - this was the ‘it list’ from the last boom and continues to be probably the biggest list of business events locally. Has 3 sections: business, technical and social. Weekly email for each section.
http://www.workit.com/events/cityevents.cfm

SocialDomain and TechDomain is a curated list of events, making it easier to process. Weekly email for social, biz/tech & singles.
http://socialdomain.com/

The BASES group at Stanford puts out a weekly email of entrepreneurial events; no website listing. Sign up here:
http://bases.stanford.edu/site/digest/index.jsp

Sign up for a FountainBlue community to receive their weekly list of biz/tech events; no website listing.
http://fountainblue.biz/aboutus/communities.html

The Churchill Club does still send a monthly listing of local events, to members only.

Looking for more? Huge list here:
http://sfbayarea.fullcalendar.com/ec/list_cal.cfm

Nancy

Posted by Nancy Tubbs on February 8th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Hey Jeremiah,

I’m just now noticing your response.

I suggested the other SF New Tech link since their site hasn’t been updated in a while and doesn’t reflect any current events that they’ve had.

Posted by Victoria on February 8th, 2008 at 5:48 pm

[...] These aren’t the only places to get trained on social media, there’s events and confernces being put on all over the globe, I recommend the Social Media Club (in multiple cities), New Comm Forum, Womma, Marketing Profs, or even try using Upcoming, or if you’re in the SF/Silicon Valley area, check out this list of ongoing events. [...]

Posted by Upcoming Workshops on February 18th, 2008 at 8:02 am

[...] But those are just two of my recommended conferences to attend (Web 2.0 expo, any Forrester Conferences, and SXSW are compulsory, of course) and if you’re in the bay area, there’s plenty of reocurring meetups (see large list). [...]

Posted by Upcoming Conferences to Attend: Where will you be? on April 28th, 2008 at 7:38 am

Thanks Jeremiah. I’ve been looking for these type of events/meetings/unconferences that I could attend to help network more while I’m in SF.

Posted by Ken on September 24th, 2008 at 9:04 am

[...] Get Connected with the Web User Groups in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area "The bay area is an amazing place for technology meetups, there’s about 4 tech related events, workshops or mixers almost every night. What’s even more interesting as this group even extends to social events on the weekends, it’s a true community" (tags: web2.0 networking entrepreneurship events) [...]

Posted by links for 2008-09-25 | mad dog in the fog on September 25th, 2008 at 12:01 pm