As many of us know, joining a few professional meetups help increase our awareness of the business, network with other professionals, and just be in the know-how. So Im wondering, let's say you have an online community you want to increase awareness and new membership, would you use meetups? If yes or not, why or why not?

Interesting that you posted this as one of my clients is trying to start a community of IT providers focused on local government and they asked me if I thought if it would be a good idea to start a linkedin group in conjunction with an in-person networking group. I suggest Meet-Up and the more I think about it the more I think that it is a natural synergy. One would feed into the other and the online relationships would be bolstered by the face-to-face meetings and vice versa.

True even though I have noticed that the majority of responses and threads started on LinkedIn groups were created by consultants and solo practitioners.