Bloosky + Meetup202 Organizer Collaboration

The past couple days I was in Irvine, California. I was there with a few other affiliate marketers to talk about the new acquisition of Bloosky and Tracking202. ...off topic... I will post up an interview I did with Wes about it as well, probably tomorrow or so. With the acquisition of Trackiing202, Bloosky has a lot of ideas that they want to do within our industry. Somethings I doubt I can talk about but one of the reason they acquired Tracking202 is because of the meetup202.

With all of us being in one room I got to meet with most of the meetup202 organizers. This is huge because we get to understand what the other organizers do. It is interesting to see some common similarities and complaints. We all discussed upgrades and how to better grow our local community.

We had 2 days of meetings and discussions. First day when I landed, I went to their office and collab with the 2 founders of Bloosky, Matt and Ryan. It was a good almost 2 hour meeting about how I run my meetup and what I recently did in the past and what I have done now to try to improve it.

We also discussed my personal overall flaw with my meetup and they suggested on what things to improve on. It was a great time for me taking in their advice and expertise. After the individual meeting the day was ours.

Bloosky took us to K1 Racing and we went go kart racing, damn that was intense! I crashed heavy into the wall... gosh. After that we went out to dinner which was a bit more personal on a network level and I got to meet with some of the managers and other users that work at Bloosky. The dinner was def good at a great place as well, Javiers.

The next day was even more intense. We had a hardcore meeting for 5 hours. It was a HUGE collaboration with Wes, Tracking202, all the organizers, Bloosky marketing development, evp of operations, founders, etc. They wanted to know at an overall level what they want to see and what others are doing and how to improve it.

It was also a big Q/A about the Bloosky/Tracking202 acquisition. It def was a very open meeting filled with fun comments and very good information.

One of the things that was brought up a lot and repetitively is the aspect of 'trollers' to the meetups and not improving themselves but just coming along for the information. Matt and Ryan suggested a filter system to try and create a funnel to separate these from others that want to learn more but can't because of these 'trollers'.

Now one thing that came to my mind was time consumption. Ryan and Matt answered with a really good response and something I tried to do myself but it has failed because again, 'trollers' participate but do not take action. So that aspect is in the works. The 5 hour meeting was really intense and really informative. While most of the organizers are just there providing an open style forum type of meeting, some do content with speakers and collaboration time. Which I think I should start to do but with a bigger crowd.

No doubt the Bloosky/Tracking202 partnership was a really good move, there is a lot going to be coming in the year 2010 in our affiliate industry. Some really big changes that I really want to see, while some are questionable which I talked to Wes, Ryan, Matt, and Jex about.

Overall congrats to Wes about to his big milestone!

BTW here is a video of all the things that wasn't talked about in the post...