Organize Your Events with Meetup

Whether you are organizing a weekly football match or are just interested to meet with people who share similar interests with you, I can say you won’t regret it if you pay Meetup a visit.

What is Meetup? Meetup helps people find others who share their interest or cause, and form lasting, influential, local community groups that regularly meet face-to-face. Meetup believes that the world will be a better place when everyone has access to a people-powered local meetup group.

But after the disappointing news they announced in May to implement monthly fee of $19/month per Meetup group, more and more people are moving away to their competitors, like Upcoming from Yahoo.

As for me, paying $19/month to organize a group for special events, e.g. local podcasters is sure worth the amount of money. Not only can I communicate with people who share similar interest, this can also be a place to grow my network of friends. Who knows if I might bump into someone who is more important in the industry and makes big bucks? That’s just an example, of course. Not everyone has the same motivation, but having more friends doesn’t hurt anyone, especially if there’s something in it for everyone.

Meetup has some great features allowing interaction between users. One of the most useful features is the message board, where members can discuss anything related to their topic.

If you don’t find any Meetup group matching your interests, you have the option to start a new one. And I believe it’s a good idea to start one, because Meetup will actually help you to find new members to join your group by automatically listing it whenever someone is looking for groups related with your topic.

But if you’re new to the whole idea, I suggest you to browse through the groups already established by other members: you can browse the topics or go for the popular topics, growing topics or simply go through all the categories. If you’re lucky enough, you might bump into the group you like.

You can also choose to join a group near your place by browsing the cities. It really covers an enormous number of countries all around the world.

For people who are willing to spend some time helping others, a Meetup group like this one, created for the sole purpose of relief effort during the Hurricane Katrina outbreak, this might sound like an appealing community.

Currently, Meetup has more than 1.6 million members for more than 4,000 interests from 55 countries all around the world. And the community is still growing. It proves that if there’s value in what you’re paying for, people don’t really care about how much they have to pay to get it. So, if you got tired of the Internet and decided that it is time to meet face to face with real people sharing a real passion, a site with more than 1.6 million members can’t be a wrong decision.