Of course, there is no International Tweetup Oversight Board. You’d think there was, though, given the outrage directed at PRSA and its Phoenix chapter after the local group held a tweetup and (gasp) charged admission to cover the cost of the meal .

I admit, when Jason Falls first tweeted this last night, I was dismayed and said so. It would have been much cooler for the chapter to have an open tweetup in order to attract people who might otherwise never have paid much attention to PRSA. And I was amused by Jason’s suggestion that non-PRSA folks hold a tweetup at the same or a nearby location and invite the PRSA people over. At that point I didn’t realize that this was a chapter dinner with a catered meal. More on that shortly.

But a post by self-described social media purist Shailesh Ghimire on the Social Media Wiz blog goes way over the top. “If you charge for it,” Ghimire proclaims, “it ain’t a tweetup!”

Yeah? Says who? Given that tweetups haven’t been around all that long and that there is no governing body, I’m wondering where the rules have been enshrined and what elected, representative body developed them on behalf of the rest of us.

How new are Tweetups? The word doesn’t appear in Wikipedia—“tweetup” redirects to “Twitter.” Nor does anything come up in Google in response to “define: tweetup.”

Despite the fact that the tweetup is a nascent concept, maleable and in its formative stages, Ghimire is representative of those who would lay down the law for the rest of us.

To me, a tweetup is a meetup organized, at least in part, on Twitter. Beyond that, it’s fair game. Common sense should prevail, but the specific details of how one is organized should be based on its nature, a decision best left to the organizers. Ghimire, however, not only thinks PRSA’s fee-based tweetup was a violation of the spirit of social media, but labels it a “hijacking.” Then he lists the “characteristics” of a tweetup, but they sound an awful lot more like rules to me. One of these rules is spontaneity, “The more spontaneous the better.”

‘Scuse me?

I was involved, along with Chris Heuer, in developing and promoting a decidedly non-spontaneous tweetup designed to encourage younger folks in San Francisco to donate blood for the first time. We modeled it largely on a similar tweetup that also enjoyed considerable success in San Antonio. These, it seems, violated the spirit of the tweetup. That’s odd, since Heuer—one of the founders of the Social Media Club—embodies the spirit of social media better than anyone I know.

In the comments to Ghimire’s post, Mike Langford notes that he held a tweetup in Boston that cost participants $20 to cover catering costs. (If it was catered, I suspect it wasn’t spontaneous, either.) “Was that wrong?” he asks?

Nope. Not at all.

What’s more, PRSA member Alison Bailin weighed in with a detailed explanation of why she added “tweetup” to the description of the event:

I called it a tweet-up in the description (again, not in the title) to encourage folks both active on twitter and those who are still getting into it to post freely about the event, post during the event and go crazy tweeting out advice after the event for our colleagues who had parenting, work or vacation obligations. In this 140-character world, I called it a lunch AND tweet-up in my short-and-sweet way to get all people to come together. The event is about inclusion.

And, of course, Alison was attacked for daring to use the word “inclusion” for an event with a cost. Right, the local, non-profit PRSA should have bought dinner for anyone who showed up. After all, they don’t need those scarce dues dollars to provide services that benefit members.

SHIFT Communications’ Doug Haslam also commented, pointing out that PodCamp Boston now charges $50, which may seem contrary to the free history of podcamps but, as he notes, the charge was meant to discourage those who signed up but never showed up, which unfairly cost the organizers money. “Pressure PRSA to have more free events,” Doug suggested, “but I???m not going to tell them what not to call a Tweetup. Sheesh.”

Right on, Doug. And let’s keep in mind, the purists don’t own social media, nor do they set the rules. That falls to the public at large.

UPDATE: I had to share this comment to the original post from Scott Monty:

I???m going to chime in here for two reasons:
1) My name was already invoked above (by Benn)
2) I coined the term ???tweetup,??? so I think I should have some say as to how it???s being used. See http://www.wordspy.com/words/tweetup.asp for the details.

Personally, I don???t care if a tweetup is free or includes a cover charge. The point of a tweetup is it???s a face-to-face meeting of two or more people who use Twitter. Period.