From its humble beginnings in 2009 at The Coffee Groundz to its current home at Impact HUB Houston, Social Media Breakfast of Houston has navigated both highs and lows, all the while serving the greater Houston area as a community-building powerhouse.
Share in its 15th anniversary celebration featuring SMBHOU co-founders Kami Huyse and Jennifer Texada; founder and president of the African American Marketing Association, Michelle Gnome; certified life transition coach and workplace wellness facilitator, Akeel Bernard, and Pod Houston founder, Ozeal Debastos, via the highlights below!
Kami Huyse: How Social Media Breakfast of Houston Got Started
SMBHOU was created to build and grow a community of practitioners around social media.
“I started to talk about why don't we have an event in Houston that…goes around social media, why don't we have something where the social media people can get together and talk to each other and figure out how to use it?” Kami explains. “Jennifer at the time was the original social media manager at MD Anderson Hospital System and she said, ‘we need this, we need this,’… and we decided to start Social Media Breakfast of Houston.”
Michelle Gnome: Why the Black Marketing Professionals Was Created
Michelle Gnome first came up with the idea of the African American Marketing Association in 2013, but it took several years to actually launch it in February 2019.
“Simply put, there was one question. It was, where are the black marketers?” she explains. “Between 2017 and 2018 there was just a lot of um marketing and advertising, social ads on social [media] as well as TV, and all types of ad campaigns, and I was like, ‘how are these messages getting approved?’ because there was either a misrepresentation or a lack of representation.” Eventually this led to the organization’s mission, which is “to galvanize and equip… and then to provide those resources and information to become better in your career or your business.”
Akeel Bernard: Rebuilding Community After the Pandemic
Post-pandemic, Akeel was trying to figure out how to bring people together in person again to build community.
He asked himself, “how do I get you to leave the comfort of that home studio that you've been working at for so long and back into the [Impact Hub] space? But little did I know that people were already feeling to do that already, people were looking to come back into a space-build community, people were getting Zoom fatigued and all of that. So we just simply asked them, ‘ what is it that you need in this new version of the space and how can we deliver that?’”
Ozeal Debastos: Creating Community for Podcasters
Ozeal was already an established podcaster when he recognized that no one was serving the local podcasting community and wanted to change that.
There “was a great blogging community here in Houston,” he explains, and “in 2018 I wanted to create a community centered around podcasters. And I was asking, ‘Where are the podcasters at? I see the bloggers, I see social media, but where are the podcasters?’ So I put it up on Meetup, and essentially it was just to create a space where podcasters could connect can collaborate and get educated on this space.”
Michelle Gnome: Dealing with Financial Challenges
Even when you see a market gap, launching a new organization is challenging.
“We launched February 2019 and then what happened a year later? So I’m like, ‘your membership dues are due and I don't feel comfortable asking you for money,’ especially just [after] the first year,” she explains. “So we made membership free for a couple of years and then last year we reinstated membership.”
Kami Huyse: Being Nimble Through the Unexpected
Seeing SMBHOU going from about 100 in-person attendees every month to being cut down in its tracks because of the pandemic was hard for Kami.
When Covid hit, “we all fell off the cliff,” she says. “When that happened we just pulled everything online and I streamed it for a couple of years, and what was great about that is I could bring people from all around the world. So if you go back and listen to those streams there are some amazing people on our streams during those couple of years, but the community was just not there.”
That’s when she contacted Impact Hub. Initially “we had just a couple of people that showed up and I was like, ‘oh, okay.’ So what I do know is that persistence pays off and that's something after 15 years that's very clear.” Today SMBHOU’s in-person attendance is stronger than ever.
Ozeal Debastos: Staying Plugged Into the Community
When things are running smoothly, it’s easy to forget that a community needs constant nurturing.
That’s why Ozeal says, “I try to make sure that I'm plugged in with the community, that I'm hosting events. We have a weekly newsletter [through] which we're staying in touch with with our community members.” Going from virtual back to in-person after covid was challenging for his community as well. “when we came out of covid, we felt the challenge in attendance… I remember going to a conference and people didn't know quite how to interact, it was weird.”
Akeel Bernard: Building an Inclusive Community
Building a community where people feel welcome starts with intention followed by action.
“I think you attract what you put out,” says Akeel. “If you look at the team here at Impact Hub, we have a very diverse team in ourselves….we all have different lived experiences.” Beyond that, “we ask our ourselves this question day and day out, is how do we serve people, meet them where they're at, but also create a space where they feel seen, heard, and valued and that is always at the foundation of every conversation that we have.”
Ozeal Debastos and Akeel Bernard: How You Support Yourself to Ensure You’re Able to Continue Serving Others
Says Ozeal, “It's one of the most rewarding fulfilling things we could do as entrepreneurs and leaders, but it's also a lot of energy, it requires a lot of time and commitment, a lot of strategizing…. so just finding time to just unplug and make sure that I'm just taking time for just that mental health.”
Says Akeel, “I'll start with apart from my role here at impact up Houston I'm also a certified life coach [and] a wellness practitioner…. I think the first thing most people should do, especially if you're an entrepreneur, is be okay with not being okay and then following that is finding a supportive group of people to rally around you. And when I say a supportive group of people, that can be your partner, it can be, you know, your very close friends, but the people that you are actually paying to support you as well, meaning your therapist, your professional coach, your mentors, your team of people around you. It's really important that you build a solid foundation of people that are wearing your team jersey every day and are speaking life into you.”
For more highlights and insights, watch the full livestream.