We all know that social networks are incredibly useful for connecting people separated by thousands of miles, but can they actually amplify — and improve — an existing community? For the answer, look no further than what Twitter has done for Des Moines, Iowa, in 2008. Below are five amazing examples.

Let’s make a couple of distinctions before I begin. At the end of the day, these case studies are about humans and the amazing things that happen when they mash their various talents, insights and minds together on a tight, local level. Some refer to this as hyperlocal. Twitter (the technology) was the accelerant that set everything ablaze. Like we tell all of our clients, social media is about people — not websites.

1.) Des Moines TweetUps

One year ago, Andy Brudtkuhl and I were chatting back and forth about the best ways to tap into Des Moines’ undercurrent creative class and somehow bring them all together. We knew these people were out there, hidden in the cracks of our community — maybe they were stuck in meaningless corporate jobs, working from windowless basements, or just out of view. At the time we couldn’t really articulate why, but we just knew it was important for Des Moines to get these minds together. It was also crucial for the mental health of Andy and myself — like many first-year entrepreneurs, we were both working from home at the time, and we needed some social interaction.

And so, in those bitter cold, early months of 2008, we started holding little grassroots events called TweetUps at various watering holes in Des Moines. These gatherings tended to self-organize, and they steadily grew in size from six people (at the first one) to an average of 30-40 people consistently. Over 90 tweeps were in attendance at the most recent ugly-sweater-themed TweetUp in December!

Andy Brudtkuhl, John Pemble and Doug Mitchell. Image courtesy of Impromptu Studio on Flickr.

Jennifer O’Connor and Lacy Brunnette.

But this isn’t really about numbers — the appeal of TweetUps seems to be the quality of the connections and friendships that are established, and the personal and professional opportunities born as a result. I think there are large numbers of people who are turned off by standard “professional networking” events: breakfasts and luncheons filled with lots of salespeople in starched white shirts, trying to stuff their rolodexes with more biz cards and phone numbers.

TweetUps are casual, laid-back, decentralized, and nine times out of 10, there is beer. (This is a big plus.) Nobody has an agenda other than meeting new friends, sharing what they’re passionate about, and learning from others.

The professional benefits of a tight Twitter community are great, but there are also personal impacts. A fellow Des Moines Twitter user mentioned something to me the other night that really stuck with me. He said that he was going on three months holed up in his house, emotionally recovering from a divorce, when he attended the first of many TweetUps. Because of the new network of friends he subsequently made, he gained back some self-confidence, purpose, drive, and happiness. That is significant. That is powerful. Find me a professional breakfast club that can claim something like this. You won’t be able to.

For me, social networks like Facebook are great for connecting me to friends from my previous life, but Twitter connects me with people I should have known my whole life.

2.) Amazing events: Des Moines BarCamp 2008, Highlight Midwest, Ignite Des Moines

As the local tech crowd on Twitter grew larger, more vocal, and better connected, plans for Des Moines’ second BarCamp were hatched. In fact, the event was promoted so well, some folks came all the way from Kansas City to attend. These new connections and conversations led to the formation of Highlight Midwest 2008, a one-of-a-kind unconference that celebrated entrepreneurs and startups from all over Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. “Flyover Country” now has a greater sense of purpose and a much louder voice.

Des Moines’s Twitter community also put together the city’s first Ignite event, which I’ve recapped here. Summary: Some pretty cool events happened due to some really smart people getting connected. One year ago, none of them knew each other, and that’s a shame.

3.) Chris Pirillo, Sarah Lacy and Gary Vaynerchuk visit Des Moines

Without the power of the Twitter community, these influential web superstars, authors, ass-kickers, bloggers (whatever you want to call them) may have never set foot in our city. How else would we show up on their radars? Okay, Chris Pirillo is from here and has family here, but local tweeps sure generated a ton of interest and buzz about his visits last spring. Local Twitter users and Vaynerchuk fans mobilized on Gary’s message boards and pleaded with him to bring the thunder to Des Moines on his book tour, and they were successful. Thunder was brought in great doses. Sarah chose Des Moines as one of the cities for her UGBT based largely on the amount of enthusiasm generated for her on Twitter.

Sarah Lacy hanging with the Lava Row crew in 2008. Image via sarahlacy on Flickr.

Visits from thought leaders like these can have profound ripple effects on a city: helping people get inspired to cut the corporate ball-and-chain, to push them to start thinking about starting their own business, to get affirmation on why they started their own business, to rethink old ways of doing things, etc. So, who should we bring to Des Moines in 2009? Charlene Li? Guy Kawasaki? Tara Hunt? Tim Ferris? Let’s start this conversation, now.

4.) Des Moines gets a co-working studio

Co-working (a national trend that involves a gathering of people in a shared space, working independently, but leveraging the synergy of working alongside like-minded individuals) has finally taken hold in Des Moines in the form of Impromptu Studio. The first conversations about co-working in Des Moines happened in late 2007 on Twitter, and over time more interest built up, more hands were raised, and then Daniel and Abbie Shipton took the discussion from “What if?” to “We’ll build it.”

If the Twitter glue wasn’t in place at the time, I doubt we would have seen a co-working studio emerge in Des Moines until 2-3 years from now. The movement is accelerating fast here in Iowa — there’s even a co-working studio (called CoLab) under way up north in Ames, a smaller college community.

5.) A brand hijack used for good

SmartyPig, a social savings site born here in Des Moines, has some damn loyal customers. When faced with a blatantly illegal copyright infringement issue, SmartyPig announced it to their Twitter followers. Fans of The Pig rushed to the company’s aid and mobilized / educated the local Twitter community on how to perform a brilliant SEO-powered brand hijack on the offending party. Within days, the issue was resolved, and SmartyPig ended up spending zero dollars in legal fees.

Hyper-connected smart people using their brains and talents for good = awesome.

Okay, it’s late at night, my eyes are tired, sentence structure is getting questionable, so it’s time to wrap up this long-winded post. My own experience with Twitter is that, personally, it has allowed me to meet lots of fantastic, bright, kind, talented people. Professionally, it has created an opportunity to be written about by national media (BusinessWeek), and it has also acted as a referral network and outreach post to attract new clients. Now that’s just one person (me). Imagine that times ten people, or times one hundred people, in a small-ish community such as Des Moines. Now you see the power that I’m talking about.

I honestly believe our local Twitter community is one of the best things to ever happen to our city. It’s helping us connect to one another more efficiently and effectively, it’s helping out on a scale bigger than its own borders, it’s forcing rapid innovation, and — best of all — it’s advancing Des Moines as a city with cultural relevance.

How has the Twitter network in Des Moines changed you, personally or professionally, in 2008? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Earlier this week, many of us in the Des Moines Twitter community learned about a rip-off of epic proportions: Local web startup SmartyPig had its CSS layout, logo and name carbon-copied by a Romanian company called TrustyPig.

Here is SmartyPig’s website (a legitimate, FDIC-insured company), designed by the legendary HappyCog:

And here is TrustyPig’s blatant rip-off:

A representative from SmartyPig had this to say in their Twitter stream to all their followers:

SmartyPig: B aware of trustypig.com. We are in NO Way affiliated with this Romanian ad outfit. Not sure what they are up to. But they have good taste.

Mike Ferarri, one of SmartyPig’s founders, expressed to me that he didn’t think there was any possible legal recourse since TrustyPig is located in Romania. That’s when the Twitter community decided to take matters into their own hands. I called for the organization of an angry mob. Andy Brudtkuhl got more specific and demanded a brand hijack, an effort which he led and organized with other Twitter users and bloggers.

A brand hijack is basically an orchestrated way to use blogs, SEO and social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed to “hijack” a brand’s placement in search engine listings. Andy further describes it in his blog post from August 11:

A brand hijack is an attempt to infuse a message as related to a brand. Often times companies do this internally or accidentally. Sometimes it starts from an external source. Most of the times it is viral. Rarely it is organized. Our goal is to takeover search results and word of mouth for the TrustyPig brand in order to communicate our message to any of TrustyPig’s potential customers.

Below is a screenshot of how effective Andy’s efforts were:

So this is a perfect example of why every company, including yours, should work their asses off to have brand enthusiasts — loyal customers who will take time out of their own schedules to defend your image.

In the first year that they’ve been in business, SmartyPig has fostered a community of customer evangelists by accomplishing the following:

• Creating an innovative, killer product: An online piggy bank that helps users visualize and share their savings goals while allowing others to contribute.
• Providing amazing customer support.
• Use of a popular social network (Twitter) to engage in real, authentic conversations with their customers. This beats an advertisement any day.

Two days after the brand hijack project began, TrustyPig changed their web design and we declared victory:

Let’s sum this up. By working hard to foster a loyal customer base, SmartyPig ended up spending zero dollars in legal fees when faced with this trademark infringement issue. The Twitter Mob took care of it for them.

Screenshots courtesy of Troy Rutter and Andy Brudtkuhl.

Follow the SmartyPig vs. TrustyPig conversation:
TrustyPig steals SmartyPig website via NerdFlood.com
TrustyPig – A Webjacker Gets Pwned via BlawgIT.com
TrustyPig.com Rips Off SmartyPig.com design via TroyRutter.com
Brand Hijack – Blogging via Getanewbrowser.com
TrustyPig – Social Brand Hijack via Getanewbrowser.com
(More links to conversations can be found on del.icio.us.)

As the flood waters rise here in Des Moines, I am keeping a close watch on IowaFlood.com, a website that aggregates content from various citizen journalists and mainstream media outlets.

The site was created by Andy Brudtkuhl (of 48Web) within just a few hours, built with Yahoo! Pipes and Wordpress. Content is pulled automatically from various sources — alerts from NOAA and the National Weather Service, tagged photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, hashtagged chatter on Twitter, blog posts, articles from outlets like WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register — and all woven together into an incredibly robust, informative news experience.

The cool thing is how seamlessly old media and new media are working together. IowaFlood.com pulls in RSS feeds from the Register, meanwhile, a Register employee on Twitter is hashtagging his tweets with #iowaflood to ensure that his newspaper’s updates are correctly pushed to IowaFlood’s front page.

This creates a nice blend of reporting from authoritative media sources and human, block-by-block coverage that armies of citizen journalists can easily pull off. Thus far, IowaFlood.com has received over 16,000 visitors, generated over 1,000 posts, and survived one database crash — mostly due to word-of-mouth.

If only we had the internet back in 1993…

UPDATE 6/13: On Friday afternoon I went out and grabbed some video of the Des Moines river nearing it’s highest levels since 1993.

UPDATE 6/21: At Thursday’s Des Moines TweetUp, I asked Andy a few questions about the logistics behind building IowaFlood.com on the fly.

I love how social media has shaped the 2008 presidential campaign and the broadcast of raw information. Tonight I’ll be participating in an exciting citizen journalism experiment: Twittering results and observations live from my caucus precinct, alongside hundreds of other Iowans. Instructions on how to follow these streams can be found in this Townhall.com blog post, or by following @IowaCaucus. As always, my Twitter feed can be accessed @nathantwright.

Twitter is just one of many “as-it-happens” social mediums (YouTube, blogs, vlogs, etc.) that will be heating up with frenzied activity this evening. Google will even be publishing caucus results as they come in, mashed with their mapping technology (the Iowa Caucus Map).

Happy caucusing!