Science Cafe Social Event in New York City

Last night over twenty members of my meetup group - NY Brainiac Singles attended a mixer and lecture at the Museum of Natural History in New York. This was a really cool venue for an event, and over four hundred people turned up, so many in fact that a lot of people did not get in. They had free appetizers and a cash bar. The guests huddled between igneous and sedimentary rocks, meteorites and globes, all set with cozy night lighting, and warm ambiance for mingling and meeting other geeks.
I noticed that there were definitely a lot of very cute women, some with boyfriends, some alone. There were people of all ages from the 20's to 70's.

What else would you need to bring out the cities geek's? But there was also a rather interesting lecture given by Dr David Buss of the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of

"Why Women Have Sex"
The lecture was themed: "Learn about mating strategies and discuss why sex is used for more than just reproduction and pleasure."


I am not sure that I got a answer to this question in the lecture, but maybe I still will have to read the book.
He talked a lot about "Mate Guarding", and made reference to observations in the animal kingdom. The most often one that I have heard is about the elephant seals on the coast of California. The males can weight up to 4000 pounds and fight for ownership of harems of up to twenty females who are usually only up to 1000 pounds. Some other males still try to poach around the edges, but typically the successful males only
last in this position for a couple of years, and then retire to the beach alone with the other spent males.





Buss also gave examples of spider and chimp mate guarding. There were some examples of some isolated human tribes in Africa. Now the big extrapolation is how this applies to modern humans living in the big city. Why do men commit most of the murders, and 90% of the time it is their spouse. Is this about control, or reckless aggression, and or is it programmed into the DNA? Not sure I got all the answers, but these things are never clear, except maybe now that I think about it, I think it would be quite interesting to pick up a copy of the Buss's book...

Not really FREE!

I found this great looking email in my inbox this morning. Alas, this is just a hook to get you in.

I saw exactly the same ad from match.com, and almost tried it out. My sister did, and was so upset.
They get you to sign up first, pull out that credit card, then there is something free, but it's not clear what - if anything.
They've got you hook-line-and-sinker!

How to get the word out - Chapter 7

In the ongoing battle on how to spread the word to my site Brainiac Dating , I have recently started to find opportunity on LinkedIn. This is the #1 site for professional networking, and not obviously set up to handle anything to do with personal relationships, such as on a site like Facebook. I call this chapter seven because the story is on-going - hopefully one of these days there will be a breakthrough in virally spreading the good word about brainiac dating.



I looked for singles features on the site, but didn't find any. They don't even store that kind of information.
However, given the professional demographic segment that uses the site, it would be an ideal target for
finding smart singles --- if I could only find an easy way...

At first I asked one of my friends to help, and he politely said "no" because he'd like to keep his personal life separate from his private life. But I proceeded on my own, and found several singles related groups.
The groups feature on the site is relatively new, but it looks like it has many cool aspects, and is perhaps even better than the groups feature on Facebook. The only problem is how to bring people to these groups!

So I created my own called Intellectual Singles. So far it has four members, which is not bad for a few days, but hopefully more will start to join. I also joined a few others which are mostly for the business side of online dating, but I think there could be some useful information exchange. I have been reposting some of my blogs here to that site, just like using this site to promote that one. It's all a full circle, but hopefully an expanding one.

I am keen to see how this experiment works.

Brainiac Dating Member Blogs

On Brainiac Dating there are many interesting blogs posted by the members.



TaylorX posted a poem, sexy_rightbrain posted some troubling thoughts on her mind, Ireadpeople posted humor about cats.
Maxheadroom Membposted a popular post about a nutty email conversation .

Read blogs here...

Brainiac Dating Facebook Fan Page

Yippee, the Facebook fans page for BrainiacDating.com finally has 50 fans! Initially only a few of my friends had joined, and I could not get much momentum going especially since I am very careful who I call a friend. So in order to get the fan page going I created a Facebook ad campaign to direct Facebook members to the specific fan page, and viola they began coming in droves. The click through rate is 20% which is amazing and the cost per click is under $0.20 so this page should be able to grow fast.

Click here for the fans page.



There are only two problems with this fan page:
1) not everyone who becomes a fan also goes to brainiac dating and joins.
2) mostly men are becoming fans.

For the first problem, I have been able to customize the appearance of the page, and hopefully put some interesting links to keep the fans reading, and then occasionally remind them that there is a whole other site to check out.
For the second problem, I have been working on different ads for women, trying different keywords, images and bids.
Unfortunately the ads targeted to single women cost almost double than those directed at men, and the join rate is not
as high with women and men, but once women find out that the site is 62% men - hopefully the will be more eager to jump aboard.