The Dali Museum is On the Cutting Edge

Did you make it to the Dali Museum's first Social Media Event on August 11? This was not just a fantastically surreal Tweetup for tech savvy people, but also a community get together for the love of art and technology. Questions about the new $36 million Dali Museum building, Salvador Dalí’s works, social media and applications were especially welcomed. They came armed with smartphones!

By Andrea Lypka. Over 200 people attended the event

“This was the most rockin-esque social media event in Tampa Bay and any museum has seen,” said Rob Neff, one of the event promoters and organizers. “We tapped Tampa Bay to help plan and promote #GetSurreal!”

Neff is a veteran Social Media event organizer with the Grand Prix St Petersburg, Surfers For Autism, and St. Petersburg Gallery Walk under his belt -- and that's just this year! He is also a NASA Tweetup attendee for Atlantis, the last space shuttle launch.

During the interview, Neff constantly tweets, takes and shares photos on his iPhone, engages in conversations online and offline and uses his pro camera to take pictures that he posted afterwards on Flickr. He tweets as @5wa and also demonstrated how attendees can share their Get Surreal moments @theDali with the world using social media, including Foursquare, Yelp, Twitter and Flickr.

He also gave a short, informal tour of the museum, which included different views of the Grotto, Avant Garden and views that people would not normally notice.

“The event at the Dali Museum was led by Mitzi Gordon, Membership Manager, who was energized and a ‘Surreal’ partner in the intense endeavor for the Tampa Bay area, Suncoast and Florida!” Neff said.

He also said the key was approaching online influencers and asking them to help spread the message through their networks, two of which go by the profiles of @MissDestructo and @NateBW.

By Andrea Lypka. Jennifer Jones Perry photographs the Glass Enigma.

When they started ramping up the messaging plan and approaching local and art influencers, their reach was only in the United States. Within a week, they had 19 countries following the messages about the upcoming event. The event also increased brand impressions and increased the followers on Twitter and likes on Facebook, with no paid ads. The brand impressions were enormous as the message was shared online and offline by newspapers, art enthusiasts and bloggers who had picked up on the viral message or had been approached by Neff. The Dali Museum had posted a Facebook events page that had 178 followers confirm they were attending #GetSurreal!

By Andrea Lypka. Volunteers greet attendees.

The fun at the Tweetup did not stop here. Attendees could watch a live feed of their tweets on the big screen at the Dali Museum, participate in a QR code scavenger hunt and learn about social media tools and apps to communicate with a global audience.

Stephanie Hayes, who goes by the Twitter handle @stephaniellen came to check out the museum and meet new people. She is a photographer and an early adopter of social media because it is a fast and efficient way to get her message out.

“I started using Google+ a couple of weeks ago and I already have more than 200 followers. I have photographers from all over the world following me. It is great that I can choose to publish certain messages to my lists that can be my friends, family or fellow photographers,” she said.

Jennifer Jones Perry, who Tweets as @dazeofadventure, says that social media is the new communication platform.

“Any business that doesn’t use social media is going to be overlooked. People are getting the news on Twitter and on Google. You are not at home these days to turn on the news, much less to read the newspaper” she said.

Perry has just returned from the last NASA Tweetup organized on August 4-5 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center that culminated in the launch of the spacecraft aboard on Atlantis STS-135, according to NASA Tweetup.

“It was a life changing experience. I was one of the 150 that was randomly chosen out of the 6,000 entries to participate in the NASA tweetup. I am homeschooling mother and it was an incredible experience to attend this event with my family,” she said.

A phenomenon on the social media sphere, Amber Osborne, aka @MissDestructo also attended the event. With close to 19,000 followers, she was voted Creative Loafing’s Best of The Bay 2010 Best Tampa Twitter Personality. She is Chief Evangelist/Director of Marketing at Social Mesh in New York City and VP of Online Brand Development at Head of Lettuce Media in Trinity, Florida. A lot of people know her as the destroyer of social media boredom on Twitter.

By Andrea Lypka

“The Dali Museum has been saying that they wanted to have a social media gathering since we had our TedX meeting here.”I am a very social person online and offline and I often say that in social media you have to be social or you are just not going to succeed in what you are doing.”

Taylor Cremo who goes by the Twitter handle @tmcremo is a volunteer at the event. The University of Florida student says she is new to social media and hopes to learn more about it.

“I did a bunch of postings for my summer internship and I thought it was the perfect time to volunteer,” Cremo said. “Social media is a new way of facilitating communication with so many people. There are so many connections you can make just by reaching out to people on Twitter. The Dali Museum is on the cutting edge.”

The Dali Museum’s new approach to go social to connect with the global community is innovative in Tampa Bay. Even though visitation in the new location has nearly doubled, these new communication platforms are the way to go, said Mitzi Gordon, Membership Manager at the museum who was the force behind the event.