The Hilton Costa Mesa was a buzz with the energy of over 400 Orange County business people and social media fans mingling, connecting, sharing, and more for the first Connect OC event held this past Thursday.

Organized by some of OC’s busiest Twitterers and savviest business owners such as @Paulttran, @nealschaffer, @smallwerks, @tanyasalcido, @travelcostamesa, and @hensel this FREE event brought allowed hundreds of people to expand their social and business networks by bringing together people from Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and those who simply heard of the event by word-of-mouth for a night that showed the ability of Social Media, and a little sweat equity, to provide fantastic events which provide value not only for the sponsors and venues, but for the people in attendance.

Hit the jump for the full review and plenty of pics from the nights event!

The wide-open restaurant/bar/lounge area of the Hilton Costa Mesa provided the great backdrop for this event which found it’s line snaking through the lobby and out into the halls (catching the Hilton staff by pleasant surprise). The event featured free food, complimentary drink tickets to the first 250 people (generously donated by the Costa Mesa Hilton), 2 Wii stations, an awesome Connect OC Presi (created by Marieke Hensel of Branding Personality), and a silent auction table with tons of great packages for auction, where the proceeds were donated to Share Ourselves.

The silent auction featured great gift packages from tons of different OC business such as Tranquil Tea Lounge, Co-Working Fullerton, Design Action Studios, Xt Patisserie, Portola Coffee, Morton’s, Charlie Palmer’s and more! Along with the specially prepared food provided by the Hilton, a Dippin Dots stand was on hand providing delicious bite size samples of their bite size treats. All of this added to the great connections being made evident by the big smiles, laughs, handshakes and hugs, going on throughout the night.

I was happy to see a lot of familiar faces of those with whom I’ve developed some good IRL relationships with (@ricdizon, @influxx, @shescookin, @healthoc, @michaelhsuing, @topbrokeroc, @funomenalrealtr, @vetlovingpetsHB) as well as a lot of people that I’ve interacted online but had yet to get a chance to meet in person (@OakleyOC, @dippindotwoman & @mswilder). The one interesting thing I noticed as I was walking and talking was the very clear differences between those who were on Twitter and those that were on Linkedin (there were tons of people who participated on both as well). The Twitter crowd was far more social and active, engaging and interacting on a more personal level, while the Linkedin crowd was far more reserved, keeping conversations a bit more generic, leading off most conversations with “What do you do?”. When talking to people from Linkedin, I got the impression they were a bit overwhelmed with an event far different from your typical business networking event.

Overall though, no matter what social media application you use, what industry you were from, or where you lived, everybody had a fantastic time at a well-organized, efficiently ran event that exceeded all goals set forth by the group. Orange County thanks Connect OC and I’m sure there are more events to come! Be sure to follow Connect OC on Facebook to stay tuned for any updates!