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This week I attended my very first @socialmelb dinner as part of Wagamama’s National Tweet Up, running in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth.

For a $5 donation towards the charity, Save The Children Australia, we each got the chance to have a sneak peek at their new Winter specials menu (one night before it launched nationally) and try one dish – free of charge.

There was also a competition held for the the most pics, best pic, most tweets and best tweet during the evening and the winners were…drum roll please…

@TheMovementFam -most tweets & most pics

@Dyllen – best tweet

@hodgoberro – best pic

Congrats guys! There is also some great pics taken by @hobbesken here

Unfortunately, during the Melbourne tweetup there was a mix up with numbers on the night, so the staff were run off their feet and our meals took much longer than usual. But at the end of the day, I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet other people from the social media scene and it really was a mixed-bag, as you never know who you might sit next to at a tweetup event.

For the record, I loved the banter with everyone on our table and even my BBQ Pork Ramen when it arrived! And to compensate, we were very lucky Vegemites and were all given a buy-one-get-one-free voucher to use anytime during the year. I just hope they raised lots of money for the Save the Children foundation!

I also got the opportunity to interview Kate Kendall, who is the organiser of @socialmelb – which is a weekly tweetup that happens every Friday morning from 8am – 10am (rain, hail or shine) at Mr Tulk, next to the State Library.

Kate spoke in-depth about her background, how @socialmelb got started and how it attracts people working across a variety of different industries – not just digital, marketing and communications.

She also mentioned that as the community has continued to grow in popularity and as business have started to engage with the @socialmelb crew, the dinners are sometimes user-led or even hospitality-led, i.e. the Wagamama’s National Tweet Up event

Finally, Kate loves the community-aspect of using social media – and although companies and brands have recently jumped on the social media bandwagon to create lots of two-way chatter and buzz – she hasn’t yet seen many examples of brands actually listening to a community and hopes to see more campaigns based around listening, not just talking to people, in the future.

You can view the full interview below:

This was shot on a Kodak Zi8.

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