"I have been on twitter now for a few months. Now what?"

Like anything else- are you REALLY on? Are you consistent?

If you are, and you have used some tools to develop a local following, great. Now let's take the next step. Why not organize a tweet-up?

A tweet-up is a face-to-face meeting, usually held at an informal venue like a bar or restaurant. For a little amount of time and no money this is an invaluable way to meet some of the people that you have chatted with online, and get to know their friends as well.

My friend Maya (@mayaREguru) is helping to organize a Delaware tweet-up. They set up a website (less than $20, including domain name), and Maya has been on a radio show, in an online news report, and has been invited back again for another stint on the radio. The tweet-up is also helping to benefit the local food bank- attendees are encouraged to bring two canned food items with them.

So, in addition to doing a couple of good things, Maya is getting a collateral amount of publicity. She is not in people's faces about what she does for a living- she is a REALTOR®- but it is mentioned each every time she is involved in the publicity. Maya is also a founding member of the TwitterQueens, and that position, together with her contacts, has helped her put together an appearance for that group on the CBS Morning Show. Do you think that they will ask her what she does and where she comes from?

Okay- and this is all BEFORE setting foot inside the tweetup and meeting people face to face!

How can you go about doing this? First, pick a date! Check and make sure it would be okay to bring a group to the location that you choose- that they do not hae an event already planned for that time. Find some way to benefit your local charity, not for publicity, but because it is the right thing to do. Maya's group chose the Food Bank of Delaware (found on twitter as @foodbankofde).

Then get the word out! Radio, local newspaper (both the calendar section and possibly a news report), twitter itself. Check out MeetUp.

Even more ideas can be found here on Mashable's site. You can be as simple or get as complicated as you like. Make sure you bring business cards with your @twitter name on them. I had special ones printed up:

These cards are strictly for social media events. Once you go to twitter, my background lists all of my contact information, so, really, all you have to do is google my name or find me by my twittername.

If you do organize a TweetUp. post it here under comments.