• by Kelly Samardak , April 13, 2009

A Spring Deluge Of Events, New York
April 2009

No I am not going to make any April showers and May flowers references. Mainly because we've already seen more snow than I care to in the official spring season. So far April has been gentle with the amount of events it's slamming my way (for now), but it has more than made up for quantity with quality. All the while I'm trying to avoid the call of peeps, chocolate peanut butter eggs, and the ever present and taunting pizza. That's right, I celebrate the Easter holiday with pizza. Not really, but I like to talk about pizza. So let's do a little recap of this past week and take a nice hard look at the month ahead.

Social Media for Social Change NYC brought granny's attic down with music, foods, a silent auction, loud attendees, lame crashers, and a tasty bar. For next time, I vote for a Fail Whale dunk tank where one of the figureheads over at Twitter dresses up in a whale costume and we either get to club him for a price or just come really close to drowning him.  If you misread that, it looks like I support violence, but really I don't. Oh, as a twist, we could refresh the Twitter site live and every time there's an "over capacity" message, the figurehead goes ker-splash.

Advertising Club Spring Ahead Networking Event: If funner were a word, I would say this cocktail party was funner than I was expecting. It revealed a bunch of new connections and a diverse blob of people. I'll be hitting the Ad Club Magazine Day on Tuesday, April 14, so maybe we'll all run into each other again. With THAT, let's see what the rest of April has in store.

Today I'll be hitting my first  Brandhacker Meetup. It's organized by Robb Hecht, who I just met at the Ad Club shindig, and Monday's agenda makes me chortle a little with its Pre-Networking and Post-networking. I think the post networking should include face painting. "Now turn to your left, and paint how you see social media on your neighbor's cheek" Fun, right?

Tuesday, April 14 is the Advertising Club's Magazine Day 2009 (as I said two paragraphs ago) AND I'm adding a big dash of awesome later that night with Flight of the Conchords at Radio City. No, I'm not covering that for this column, just showing off.

Wednesday April 15 is going to be taxalicious. I mean, what better day on earth is there than tax day? I love the IRS. I like another acronym much better and that is NHL. Back in the day, when I was a Detroiter, Sega Genesis NHL Hockey helped me learn every single Red Wings player. My dad and I stayed up all night playing that game. And now, I get to cover the first ever NHL Tweetup on tax day! It's doubling as a great way to unite the NHL fans on Twitter and also to launch The Portal, a site taking the fans inside the action so you can feel the punches and body checks. You'll read all about it here.

The week of April 20-24 is a busy one, with Gotham Media Ventures' "Media 3.0-What's Next?" at the Samsung Experience at the Time Warner Center on the 20th, "Perfectly Imperfect" book launch party at the bar at JWT on the 21st, MediaPost's Digital Out of Home Forum and Expo AND Digital Out of Home Awards (which I'll be covering) on the 22nd, Digital Dumbo on the 23rd, and on the 24th; Spring For a Cure -- an event to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, where the Celebrity Chair is Bethenny Frankel from "The Real Housewives of New York City." Yes, this little piece of info excites me, as I am addicted to reality TV and Bethenny is my favorite housewife. Even though she's not a wife, but details, people, details.

It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks, so hold on tight -- and if we bump into each other, get ready for your close-up!

Send invitations to kelly@mediapost.com and we'll chew on celery together!

There are a ton of new photos in the Flickr Collection, so flip through them!