Social Media Club San Francisco Tonight – 20FEB2007

If you were not aware of our meeting tonight here in San Francisco and are not busy somewhere else, we hope you can join us for a very interesting round table / workshop. We are very pleased to have our friends Tom Abate and Tom Foremski leading a discussion about what makes a good interview, and more broadly how to be better journalists. Tom Abate has written up a good post called “How to make friends and interview people” which you can read before coming down to CNet HQ tonight at 6pm. Please register here if you are coming…

My inspiration behind this topic was the realization that I often spend too much effort trying to get out my own thoughts and ideas, rather than giving my full undivided attention to the person I am interviewing. While that may just be symptomatic of the fact I am interviewing my peers, I guess I should have gone for the Major in Communications while at American University instead of the Minor. Ultimately, my hope is that we can all learn a thing or two about the process of interviewing someone and are able to improve the quality of of our blogs and podcasts. (if you want to bring a podcast rig, or video camera for your interviews, please do so!)

6:00pm – Registration opens, beers are cold
6:30pm – Kickoff
6:35pm – Introductions, share a new resource, tool or site you are now using
6:50 (or so) – Tom and Tom will be speaking for about 30 minutes, after which we will have a short break
7:30pm – Workshop – I propose that we break into pairs to do practice interviews for 5 minutes each focused on using some of the techniques and tips you learned, questions to be discussed
7:50pm – Reconvene as a group to discuss what worked, what didn’t work and what you learned
8:15pm – Wrap up

We will have beers and waters on hand to quench your thirst and a few light snacks while you soak in the good conversation.

We are getting busier and busier helping people all over the country and the world, which means we could really use some more help locally in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to assist things in running more smoothly here. If you are interested in helping organize future San Francisco gatherings, please let us know and/or just edit our San Francisco Wiki page, which is one of the things that needs help in getting updated at the moment…

BTW – the tag for the event is smc:interviewing