Life imitates Twitter at a hotel in midtown Manhattan

In-person meetings at the Roger Smith support its social media network

Managing social media doesn’t require you to sit in front of your computer all day, obsessively check your @ replies on Twitter or log into Facebook from your BlackBerry while dining out.

You can do your job while grabbing a drink or sharing meal with someone you met on Twitter or Facebook. That’s right, social media is at work while you engage in that fabled face-to-face interaction. Although social media can replace in-person meetings—it can also facilitate them.

Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson—the guys in charge of social media at Roger Smith Hotel, a boutique hotel in midtown Manhattan—increasingly find their days of blogging, tweeting and Facebooking are punctuated by face-to-face meetings in the hotel’s bar, its event space or its restaurant, Lily’s. They’re making “real-life” connections and friends out of many of their virtual connections.

“We build relationships online, we meet people online, we engage with people online, but then we’re actually a location, so people can come here and meet each other in person,” says Wallace, Roger Smith’s new media manager.