Craving Connection, Creating Community

Have you noticed a wave of creative breakfast meetings, retreats and conferences? It’s like the bigger, more expensive trade show-type conferences have given way to more intimate, often free to attend, gatherings. It is almost as if, in this plugged in, digital world of ours, people are craving a more personal, IRL connection. 

Can you feel it?

Recently, I attended a Connecting Things event in Irvine, which was a screening of the documentary “Love and Bananas.” I had attended another event of theirs over a year ago, when the guest speaker was filmmaker Bayan Joonam from Soul Pancake. There was not much interaction at that one. There was a big turnout and though you were encouraged to network, people mainly came to listen and learn. Everyone seemed friendly enough and oh yes, there was pizza, Pie-Not and Kombucha!

By the way, “Love and Bananas: An Elephant Story” is a beautiful documentary about saving Asian elephants, but that’s an article for another time.

Then there’s Creative Mornings, which I have yet to attend. It is a breakfast lecture series for the creative community and they hold them in cities around the world. I’ve also been seeing a surge in women-only events like Create Cultivate.

“People crave comfort, people crave connection, people crave community.”— Marianne Williamson

So what does this have to with me? Well, I’ve been working on something but it’s still in its infancy. I want to announce it with a big bang, or maybe just slip into things quietly. I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll do both. Or maybe I’ll just blog about it here and share our progress.

Alright, are you ready? Here we go.

About half a year ago, I started hosting social media breakfasts as a way to meet fellow content creators. We shared tips and tricks with anyone who needed any social media and marketing help. We learned from each other. Some of my breakfast-mates I had already worked with and some I wanted to work with. Those were good times. When the social media breakfasts went on hiatus, my cohorts and I found ourselves missing each other, missing the exchange of ideas and really missing being able to collaborate.

Photo above by Jackie Lovato

Fast forward to today. Five of these brunch buddies and I have come together to form our own creative collective. We are writers, photographers, public relations professionals, and social media managers. In a word, we are storytellers. And we’ve formed a company that I call c3komunity which stands for “connect, create, and collaborate.”

Like I said, we’re just starting out and I invite you to check out our website that I’ve been working on. Basically, you hire us to create content and we create a social media strategy for you and you can take it on yourself and use the content as you see fit. Explaining this process to a prospective client is our biggest challenge right now. But see it’s like this: Let’s say you have a product to launch, you’d hire a photographer, writer, social media person, and publicist separately paying $$$. Or you could go through a big agency and pay even more $$$$. The process would take months to come up with creatives, get approval and finally launch.  

Well, here’s where we come in. We’re a one-stop shop, all the creative and production work done by our c3komunity, with a reasonably fast turnaround time too. So you could hire us directly, or your agency can hire us too. The goal is for us to creatively and effectively TELL YOUR STORY.

Is that something you’d be interested in?

*This post was originally published on marcietaylor.com