The 42nd Estate

A few months back we added the Swagger team as one of our hosting clients. Right now the team is composed of Sian-Pierre Regis and Monique Meertens. Their Swagger brand extends to Swagger Paris and Swagger Reloaded, two sites where they promote the latest fashion trends seen on the streets of Paris and New York City. Sian has spent the past several months in Paris, France getting the Swagger Paris brand up and rolling. He’s back in Boston for the week and this past Tuesday we met up to catch up and exchange ideas before rolling out to the TweetNetworking Boston event.

Networking works

As Sian-Pierre and I are both graduates of the 2002 class at the Boston Latin School, I gave him and Monique a few social media and web marketing pointers here and there to help out my fellow entrepreneurs. One of the big general tips I’ve continuously preached to Monique and Sian is that building a web-site is really about building a community and connecting with like minded individuals.

After our coffee shop meeting, Sian and I headed down to the tweetup at the Red Sky Lounge. It was Sian’s first ever tweetup and such a rousing success that he’s already discussing starting similar events in Paris when he heads back.

Why was it such a success?

Dart Boston Builds Bridges

Sian and I both met tons of great people at the tweetup. Meeting passionate people, no matter their field of expertise, is always valuable but meeting someone who can help you and who you can help near immediately is priceless.

At the tweetup, Sian met Cort Johnson from Dart Boston. When you meet Cort, it’s instantly apparent that he is genuinely passionate about being a young entrepreneur and helping other young entrepreneurs. In a nutshell, that is what Dart Boston does.

More explicitly, Dart builds bridges between entrepreneurs who need help and feedback from certain areas, with talented professionals in those exact fields. It’s a similar concept to Boston Young Entrepreneurs, but whereas BYE connects entrepreneurs from all fields with other entrepreneurs, Dart seeks out three targeted experts to directly connect with the young business owner and provide them feedback where they need it most. They accomplish this via their podcast show, Pokin’ Holes.

And that brings us to why Sian found his first tweetup to be so amazing. After talking to each other, Sian and Cort realized they could both help each other. Cort needed a young entrepreneur to help on this week’s Pokin’ Holes show and Sian (like near any entrepreneur) loves getting help from experts. So, this week, Sian-Pierre will be the guest entrepreneur for Dart’s Pokin’ Holes podcast, where he’ll receive help from three experts for his Swagger Paris site.

Dart Promotes Entrepreneurs

Cort and the other members of Dart saw that the City of Boston is filled with smart, passionate people in all fields, but also noticed that the various industries are quite segmented from each other. Dart is an attempt to bridge that gap and bring all of us closer together to help each other make our startups succeed.

Dart Boston does not stop there though. Cort explains that another goal of Dart is to:

create a marketing channel where all the young entrepreneurs in Boston can showcase their projects. Many young entrepreneurs don’t yet have the credibility to turn heads toward their individual projects. Dart Boston is creating a channel that everyone can collectively promote, in turn bringing more eyes to each entrepreneur’s individual project.

Each individual entrepreneur or startup faces a steep climb in reaching the top of the marketing mountain, but together we can create our own marketing force (we love empowering people and organizations to become their own marketing force here at The 42nd Estate). It’s a great concept and one that could potentially help all young entrepreneurs in Boston.

Update: Here’s the link to the Pokin’ Holes podcast episode on Swagger Paris.

We’ll bring you an update on Sian’s spot on the Pokin’ Holes show after it wraps. Come meet up with Sian-Pierre, Cort, and the other members of Dart Boston at Red Sky Lounge for an after-show wrap party. I’ll (already) be there too as part of the Networking for a Cause Boston event, where The 42nd Estate will give out four hours of social media consulting to one non-profit.

Tags: dart boston, swagger paris

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:10 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.