Outsiders may raise a snooty bluster, complaining that Indianapolis is too small. Everyone calls it the “smallest big city on Earth.”

I’d challenge them to survive a week in the sleepy, three-stoplight town where I grew up. Compare the heaps of things to do here in the Circle City with having to drive an hour just to get to the nearest town with a mall. And everyone knows everybody’s business! Every detail is out there, and pity on you if you’re the subject! There’s no control over the message. The only place I’ve ever seen news and gossip get out faster than in Petersburg, Indiana is on Twitter.

In fact, Twitter seems to be causing Indy to shrink a little more on a daily basis. How many events did you find just this week, via Twitter, that you wouldn’t have known about otherwise? The Twitter grapevine is considerably more productive than the Pike County gossip mill. Breaking news gets out within literally seconds, because everyone can tweet via text from wherever. Throw in another, more locally-targeted social network, and the fun really picks up. Smaller Indiana creates, well, exactly that. Users of Twitter.com and SmallerIndiana.com are using the interaction of both sites to energize commerce, promote their diverse personalities, and best of all, connect in ways you never could before in a teeming metro area. The city really does feel smaller, but in all the right ways and fewer of the annoying ones. (Well, unless you count Bieber Fever ruining our peaceful environment. Get off my lawn, tweeners!)

Amy Stark (@amystark) may not have been the best choice for diversity of opinion on this matter, if only because a one-on-one conversation between me and her results in a lot of “preaching to the choir,” to use the old colloquialism.

“Social Media can feel like a small town because it is so easy to focus only on one group, one niche corner where it is small town,” Amy said.

One point she brought up, among many, was the selective nature of online networking, a quality face-to-face schmoozing lacks. “There’s a huge bonus when you network virtually; ignoring is socially acceptable in Social Media and it is not in face-to-face networking events … In social media, if someone stretches out their hand in a friend request, it’s ok to ignore them with no guilt, no social faux pas. This means you tailor your online community to your preferences. It’s easy to categorize people according to their likes and find people who share an interest.”

The personal angle is a fascinating area of study, but the proliferation of online networking has also been flypaper for marketers and business owners, who see free publicity and want to cash in. Few of them get the point, if the number of annoying and unsolicited tweets hawking a product are any indication. Bad move.

Here is an example of the way successful Twitter marketing works:

I had the hardest time finding a mechanic I trusted once I moved out from my parents’. More often than not, if my car needed work, my parents would chip in the extra funds to just have their mechanic make the 50-plus mile drive to Evansville to patch things up. He wasn’t just a mechanic; he was a friend of the family. He only lives about a mile down the road from my parents. You can imagine my terror at having to find someone in Indy, much farther away, and without any rapport.

That was until I met John Cannon (@mycardoc) at a local small-business fair I found via –you got it– Smaller Indiana. Never have I met anyone who comes so close to the small-town, family-friendly mechanic I’d left behind. Using the dual social platforms of Twitter and Smaller Indiana, John has solidified and energized his personal brand, a neighborly car doctor who makes house calls. I tweet to him for maintenance advice, and home doesn’t feel so far away. Locals can banter away on local politics, current events, new and old jokes, and life-changing events. Feels like old conversations with my parents’ mechanic on our back porch at home, digitized.

If you tweet at all, I’m sure you can relate when I say the service has helped me connect with so many people I’d have never known otherwise. From home, I know pasty farmers and coal miners, with the requisite farmer’s tan and John Deere hats. People are content to work at the local power plant or factory, or cashier at the town’s one grocery store or handful of banks. That’s just never done it for me. I had to grab for an education and a more diverse life. But in college, all the go-getters came off as too cookie-cutter and smarmy. In hindsight, I was just a fish of a different color, in a pond that didn’t fit.

I love geeks. I love their authenticity. The local geeks, back in Evansville, often preferred basement tabletop role-playing to getting out and networking. That’s still what they’re doing, actually. They pay the bills with retail mall jobs they could have gotten without cracking a book. Because they didn’t find people to network with, or any valuable mentors with whom they could relate. The town where we came of age was small, but in the wrong sort of way. I balked at networking, because the networking fairs I went to were full of uncaring, uninteresting people who only wanted to use other people. I craved more, and in the little world I knew, more didn’t seem to exist.

Thanks in large part to Twitter, a whole new universe has opened up, and it’s the kind of network I didn’t even know I craved.

Consider Erik Deckers (@edeckers). The local blogger and comedy writer is one of many people who almost certainly wouldn’t have fallen into my social circle without the Internet’s intervention. He doesn’t share my small-town background, but in our online conversation, he detailed his own experience:

I had worked for the state government for over a year, and never left the building or had a need to get to know people outside the state government system. But I left, joined the private sector, and started networking. At that same time, Smaller Indiana started up, and I became a part of a very interconnected community. That created several new opportunities for me, and I realized that any large organization that has a “you don’t need to associate with people on the outside” mentality will stagnate. But a lively community of people who care about each other, and the community as a whole, can accomplish a lot more than organizations who think they’re the only source for change — more often than not, things are happening without them.

Consider how the give-and-take exchange of the online community has taken news from a one-way show to a two-way conversation. Local weather guru Paul Poteet has been a media personality, in some form or another, for 30 years, and was a pioneer in the Web community. He was well ahead of his time, with a Web site he has run since 1998. I asked him if the growth of online community has given him an impression of increased connection in Indy.

“I think there is something to that, in that members of these little online communities probably know a lot of least superficial things about each other,” he said. “I now have business relationships with a couple of people that I initially “met” while tweeting. On a more general scale, being involved with New Media has exposed my personality to people who would have never heard me on the radio or seen me on TV.”

The common trend of human connection continues. The new face of business development seems to be one that is hobbled without the “human element.” People don’t want you to just tell them the weather or fix their appliances anymore. They want you to engage them on a one-on-one level while you do it.

We live too often within this false dichotomy that you can make a living, or you can be happy. Let’s face it. These entrepreneurially-spirited local leaders grew up in a very different world than mine. Would our social strata have overlapped so easily without the new digital network that’s sprung up in the last few years?

Then, there is the wealth of potential for a new wave of word-of-mouth event promotion. Is your Aunt Evelyn selling first-rate homegrown tomatoes? A few streets may have gotten the word before. Now, you can tell the whole state. People who didn’t know you existed before seeing your announcement retweeted just may drop by. You can spread the word as fast as scandalous news spreads in a town smaller than IUPUI.

To say this isn’t a revolution is to have your head under one massive pile of sand. The little big city of Indianapolis just got a little smaller, but in the right ways. It’s still big enough to make a mark, and we now have more tools to do so than ever before. Geeks of Indy, thanks for helping make it happen. If you’re not a geek yourself, go thank one.

Then, get up and find something to do! With this wealth of info only a click away, you have no excuse not to.

Erik Deckers said it best. “Get on, start connecting with people, and participate in the conversations … If you can’t find what you need, ask for it. If no one has it, make it.”

Leah Barr : Short in stature but big in heart, Leah geeks out on public radio, industrial music, sci-fi, and current events. Her day gig is in customer service. She is a part-time marketing diva with an enduring love for nerds, geeks, dorks, weirdos, and drop-dead awesome events. She's most likely to be seen wearing out her cell phone, outlining new projects on her laptop, playing dress-up, feeding her energy-drink addiction, or all the above at once.