Wow, is it ever turning out to be a busy social media summer here in Austin. One thing’s for sure — you’ll know where to find us if you want to connect with the Every Dot Connects team. Here’s what we’re up to in July:

July 3 ~ Social Networking Blood Drive

Mike and Connie will be joining the Austin Twitter/Tech community to save lives by donating blood on Thursday, July 3, at the Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas. Connie had the idea to do a blood drive in association with the Frozen Pea Fund, and Michelle Greer and David Neff stepped up to help organize the Austin event.

The idea is to gather with some friends from your favorite social network — Twitter, Plurk, Ning, Facebook, for example — at your local blood donation center and give a few pints for a good cause. It’s especially timely this Thursday, which is the day before a major summer holiday, when the blood banks need extra inventory.

Choose a sign-up time for the Austin blood drive here. And if you organize a drive in another location, please let us know here.

July 16-17 ~ SEM for SMB Conference

Connie will be speaking at Search Engine Marketing for Small and Midsize Businesses. The conference will cover both business and technical topics and give attendees hands-on training with tools, processes and skills needed to deliver more return from online marketing and advertising. In addition, attendees will be able to sign up for one-on-one sessions with speakers, so you can get personalized attention for your specific needs.

Every Dot Connects is happy to provide an additional $50 off of the registration fee of $195, making it $145 for two-day, meals included. Please use smc2008 as the discount code during the payment process. Please register today, the early-bird discount ends on July 1.

July 17 ~ Social Media Club Austin

Andy Meadows of Live Oak 360 is speaking at our next meeting on July 17. Thanks to the generosity of Joshua Baer and Datran Media, we’ll again be meeting at their conference room. Pizza and networking at 6:00 p.m.; program begins at 6:30 p.m.

July 18 ~ Every Dot Connects workshop in Austin

We’re happy to welcome Jennifer Navarrete as a speaker for our summer workshop series lineup. She’ll join Sheila Scarborough for a three-hour, hands-on workshop on Web 2.0 tools, followed by an informal lunch where the conversation will continue. The workshop will be from 9:00 a.m. to noon on Friday, July 18, at the Hilton Garden Inn in northwest Austin.

Watch this space for more information and a link to online registration later this week. Or, drop our admin Erin a note and ask to be placed on the mailing list.

Update:  The 18 July 2008 workshop info/registration page is now live.  Click here to Learn Three Web 2.0 Tools in Three Hours.

July 19 ~ BlogHer in Second Life

Can’t make it to San Francisco for the annual BlogHer conference? Stay at home and join the virtual conference, sponsored by CNN iReport.com, which features livestreaming of keynotes from BlogHer to Second Life. By the way, men are welcome to attend. Check out the schedule and register here. It’s free! A full house is expected, so register soon.

Connie will be speaking on an exclusive Second Life-only panel on Saturday afternoon called Using Second Life for Good. The BlogHer in Second Life office will be open beginning on Monday, July 15, so you can familiarize yourself with Second Life and get assistance mastering the basics of attending in-world events. Or just chill out on some cozy floor pillows while drinking some virtual lemonade and thinking of all that gas money you’re saving.

July 25 ~ Every Dot Connects workshop in San Antonio

Sheila and Jennifer will repeat the three-hour workshop in San Antonio. August and September dates will be announced soon, as well as a new all-day seminar on starting a blog.

Please let your friends know about these workshops. They are especially good for people just dipping their toes into social networking, and are designed to provide a no-fear environment for learning the basics. We are also available for onsite training at your business. Contact us for a quote on a customized training session.

I am extremely excited about the response that the W-List is getting on this site and everywhere else. In the grand scheme of democratizing communications, it is wholly appropriate to help each other find the best and the brightest. As a man, I’m honored to be associated with a social media consortium, and its blog, that is majority female. I’m happy to counsel any male out there who doesn’t understand why the list a good thing.

I have a another notable “w” that I want to ballyhoo a little. Through Connie Reece, our own member of the W-List, I have met one of the smartest people I think I might ever meet…and I’ve met some really smart people.

William Hurley, also known as “whurley”, hence the “w”, is the open-source expert at BMC Software, Inc., which has a major campus here in Austin, Texas.

whurley calls himself an “evil genius”. I don’t know about the evil part, but I do know that he is seeing the future when many of us are still trying to make sense of the past and present. What I also know is that he is a true visionary regarding social media, an internationally recognized expert on open source and will be sharing his thoughts with a bunch of us at the August meeting of the Social Media Club of Austin.

I also know that this “evil genius” is a really nice person and is interested in all kinds of efforts to bring the advantages of community, through access to information and the latest innovations in technology, to as many people as possible. And I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m sure he supports the W-List as well. In fact, maybe whurley and I should start the “Friends of the W-List” list.

Join us if you can. Excerpt from the Social Media Club Austin website:

The Social Media Club of Austin will resume monthly meetings on Thursday, August 23rd, at 6 pm. The first meeting of SMC Austin, since breaking for the summer, will be held at BMC Software’s headquarters located at 10431 Morado Circle, Building 5 / BMC Software Executive Briefing Center, EBC-A and B, Austin, Texas 78759.

The speaker for the meeting is William Hurley, aka “whurley”, Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, Inc.

Y, also of BMC, will be introducing him…I couldn’t resist that one. Hope to see you there.

I’m a new evangelist for coworking in Austin. After spending time talking with my friends whurley, Kelley Burrus and Erica O’Grady about it, I’m convinced that Austin shouldn’t just be a coworking location, we should be a model for others. If you’re not familiar with the term “coworking”, check out the Coworking Community Blog. Simply defined, coworking is a movement to create cafe-like community/collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.

I agree totally with C.C. Chapman of Crayon that working from home and the office can both get creatively stifling at times. I’ve sought out just about every coffee bar in town looking for that perfect third space where I feel just right. Every time I venture out, however, I never know exactly where I’ll be able to set up the laptop and get right to work. All too often, I end up just drinking coffee and thinking about how I might be getting more work done back in the office. If only there was a another place to go.

What some of us are talking about for Austin is a place where tecchies, writers and creatives of all stripes, could buy a membership, much like a gym where you go to exercise. Necessary technology would be built in and provided in a comfortable setting. Of course there would be a coffee bar and maybe even food. Workspaces and lockers would be available. Venture capital and government sponsorship could foster the creative genius that would gather. Relationships would develop organically and natural collaboration would be inevitable.

If you think this is a good idea for Austin, I’d love to hear from you. Many of us involved in the Social Media Club of Austin want to help see it happen right here in the creative capital of the U.S. We’d love for you to help. I’ll keep you posted on how the movement is progressing.

At Austin’s sold-out Social Media Club meeting last Thursday night, I admit feeling a bit of relief upon learning that I’m not as behind the curve as I feared. Panelist Omar Gallaga, who writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman, told us that he didn’t know what a social media press release was until he was asked to speak at the meeting, and furthermore, most of his colleagues at the newspaper don’t know about or use RSS, Technorati or del.icio.us, can’t download or view videos on the Statesman’s computer systems and don’t have time to explore the blogosphere.

While conceding that some features of the SMPR are useful and welcome, Omar says successful pitching is about the PR professional’s relationship with the reporter. The content of the pitch, several audience members noted, is still the most important factor in getting a reporter’s interest. Many reporters get hundreds of emails a day, most irrelevant to their work, and detest getting unsolicited photos and .pdf files. Nothing new or surprising there.

While I am super excited (as geeky as that sounds) about incorporating social media tools into my work, I’m being a bit cautious, learning all that I can, and reminding myself that the story is still the most important part of a pitch, whether it’s to traditional media or to bloggers. As Todd Defren, creator of the SMPR says: it “merely amplifies prospective source materials; it does not replace a well-crafted, customized pitch nor replace the need to provide basic, factual news to the media.”

Every Dot Connects team member Cynthia Baker will serve as moderator of the next Social Media Club meeting in Austin. Here are the details. Please join us for an entertaining and educational evening.

Topic: The Social Media Press Release

Who should attend: PR professionals, business and association communicators, interactive marketing and tech professionals, bloggers, vloggers and podcasters.

Thursday, May 17
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
ZACH | Zachary Scott Theatre
1510 Toomey Rd.
Austin, TX 78704

PLEASE NOTE: Pre-registration is not necessary but is strongly recommended. We expect this event to sell out, so make your reservations early. The $5 registration fee helps us cover the cost of renting the venue. Register here.

Moderator
* Cynthia Baker, public relations professional and co-founding member of Social Media Club

Panelists
* Kevin Dill is president of Press Release News Network and CEO of Applied Internet Research. Austin-based PRNN is a press release and archival network capable of dynamic social and multimedia press release creation and distribution. A.I.R. is a third-party provider of R&D and implementation of Internet technologies; the company developed proprietary kiosk software for a gaming company this past year. Kevin has an extensive background as a systems engineer, facilities engineer and Internet marketing.

* Omar Gallaga is a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman covering the culture of technology. While at the Statesman he has been editor of ¡ahora sí!, the Cox Newspapers’ Spanish-language newspaper, and an editor of entertainment and technology. He’s a staff writer for TelevisionWithoutPity.com and other Web sites including his own Terribly-Happy.com, the online comic “Space Monkeys!” and his Statesman staff blog, “Digital Savant.” He’s a founding member of Austin’s sketch comedy troupe The Latino Comedy Project and also writes for “The Almost Late Show with Bobby Bones.”

* Clint Howell is the account executive for Business Wire Austin/San Antonio, assisting local clients from Dell Computer and Introgen Therapeutics to Tootie Pie Company and KittyTrainer.com. As a product specialist for EON-Enhanced Online News, he shares what he has learned as a frequent host of Business Wire’s weekly EON webinar. Previously, Clint was a founding member of Market Wire Inc. While he is fairly diligent about updating his “Clinternet” profile on MySpace, LinkedIn and FaceBook, he’s also been known to take an occasional flight in Second Life as “Sword Sabre.” Clint prefers his first life as father to two loving boys and three rowdy dogs.

*Michael Pranikoff, director of Emerging Media at PR Newswire, is responsible for educating PR Newswire staff and customers about the role emerging media, such as RSS, blogs, social networks, search engines, and other Web 2.0 technologies, play in public relations. He has been with PR Newswire since 1998 and is an active participant in the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the DC Technology Council, the Software Information Industry Association. Michael has been a featured speaker and moderator at events for PRSA. Prior to joining PR Newswire, Michael worked for MacNeil / Lehrer Productions, which produces the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.