Social Media Club Los Angeles!

Much thanks to Sally Falkow of for taking the initiative to organize a Social Media Club meeting in Los Angeles. It is going to be a busy September ahead, but very very very exciting to get things rolling around the country and around the globe. We hope to get some really great feedback on the direction of the organization and continue the conversation about the new Media Release. I will be sharing my findings from the XPRL group meeting in London, and insights from our discussions in New York and Miami.

Social Media Club Los Angeles
Thursday September 28, 2006
4:30PM - 6:30PM

Hosted by Expansion Plus & PRESSfeed
6767 Forest Lawn Drive
Suite 212
Los Angeles, CA 90068

Sally is working on some great technology that helps businesses become involved in the conversation. On the way to the Silicon Valley meeting last month, I had a great conversation with her about her experiences in South Africa and her decision to move to the states. Not only is she bright and insightful when it comes to Internet Marketing and helping companies make the most of RSS, she is an all around great person who I am glad to have met. We look forward to working with her, and other organizers down in LA.

So if you have an interest in Social Media, and live near the City of Angels, come on out on September 28, 2006 and join the conversation!  Help us shape the future of this very important group and discuss the key issues of our emerging field.
PS - That night I will be organizing a Blogger Dinner somewhere in Hollywood and also getting a chance to catch up with my Little Brother James Zinkand (from Big Brothers Big Sisters) who recently biked half way across the country and is now engaged in some pretty interesting entrepreneurial endeavours of his own. He is only 19 and has already climbed Mount Fuji and recently biked half way across the country! It’s good to know that I was able to provide a little bit of positive direction - better to be able to say that we are friends and brothers over 10 years later and 3,000+ miles from home!

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Going Beyond Silicon Valley…

In last week’s NMRCast, I mentioned that I was considering an extended trip to host a few Social Media Club meetings outside Silicon Valley. On Saturday evening, Kristie and I decided that I should commit to the trip and see if providence would really move.

We are still working out the details and are looking for client opportunities, sponsorships and other support, but here is the initial schedule we are working with:

9/13 - Arrive in London, get my bearings and stay with the ever insightful Jackie Danicki
9/14 - Open day of meetings, XPRL Meeting at 3pm
9/15 - Afternoon/evening - Social Media Club London Kickoff Meeting
9/18 - Fly to New York, Social Media Club New York Kickoff Meeting that evening
9/21 - Fly to Miami, Social Media Club South Florida Kickoff Meeting (or on 9/25?)
9/22 - Drive to Orlando for Blog Orlando to hang out with Josh and all the other Disney loving Bloggers out there
9/25 - In Miami for business meetings
9/26 - Fly home to San Francisco in the early evening

In planning for this trip, and discussing Social Media Club operations, it became clear that my original goals for hosting 25 or more Founders Circle Events this fall was overly optimistic. We are still assesing this aspect of the launch plans, but intend to hold true to the spirit of the original idea - to get out into the rest of the world and understand how other people view social media and learn what people want from a Social Media association.

I can not begin to tell you how excited I am about this trip. More details to come later this week…

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NMRCast #6 - Business Wire Joins the Group

Just a brief update about the status of the working group, Chris’s efforts to attend the XPRL working group meeting in London, and Business Wire’s involvement.

Download the file here (MP3, 5.1MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Shel Holtz has links to the New Media Release wiki and the Google group on his website.

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Social Media in Silicon Valley

For lunch today I met with former ‘eastwicker’ Giovanni Rodriguez and Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski to discuss ideas we had for hosting a conversation on Social Media among Silicon Valley Marketing and PR professionals. After a couple of hours of brainstorming and bs’ing, we have a great idea for doing something unique. We are organizing an event that will provide key insights and strategies for Silicon Valley communication’s professionals to make the most of Social Media, and right now, we are looking at holding the evnt in the 2nd half of October.

Giovanni and Tom have agreed to be Co-Chairs of this event, as well as becoming Presenting Sponsors. They will be helping with the content, event design and promotion - ensuring we have the right mix of participants. Yes, we are taking about a participatory, interactive dialogue rather than a “Panel’s and Podium’s” sort of event - but more on that to come over the weeks ahead as the details fall into place. We are also making this a fee based event, rather than a free one, with discounts for Social Media Club members (more on that piece to come after Burning Man and the Labor Day Holiday).

At the moment, we need help with the big pieces of this emerging puzzle - venue, sponsors, volunteers. We have some good location leads in Silicon Valley, but we are still open to other suggestions or opportunities. If you have any interest in helping with this event, please do contact us and let us know.

I am very, very excited to have the combined wisdom and support of two of the most enlightened Social Media thought leaders I know. This is a powerful first step in expanding the types of programs we are offering through Social Media Club - we are certainly off to a good start, and heading in the right direction.

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NMRcast #5 - The Content Episode

The discussion covered the possible integration of XPRL aand the hRelease format; the results of a Social Media Club meeting on Wednesday night where the new-media release was addressed; the development of a working group; and the announcement of a case study contest.

Download the file here (MP3, 13.9MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Shel Holtz also provides some valuable links on his website relating to this podcast.

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Social Media Club Meeting #1 Podcast

This is the podcast of the first public Social Media Club Meeting, held in Mountain View, CA at the offices of Interplast.org.

Listen in on the discussion with Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Todd Defren, Tom Abate, Sally Falkow, Mark Nolan, Todd Van Hoosear, Jason Baptiste, Lisa Chung, Jenn McClure, Seth Mazow, Pat Meier, Shannon Clark and Kristie Wells.

The meeting started with Chris describing the purpose of Social Media Club and his desired goals of making the club a successfull “Not for Loss” organization. The group then started a discussion on what was needed to bring more credibility to social media creators as journalists and the issue of ’sourcing’ and ‘crediting’ facts. The second half of the discussion was focused on the new Media Release efforts being undertaken by the community to modernize the traditional press release as a Microformat.

There were some great insights from the many different perspectives that were in the room - competing agencies, competing wire services, bloggers, technologists and journalists. As Mark Nolan from PRNewswire commented, “if you create a safe environment with Social Media Club for everyone to come together, it will go a long way towards helping the industry innovate and evolve.”

We hope to be doing that and quite a bit more. Thanks to everyone for coming out, especially those of you who agreed to join the hRelease working group to move from our initial discussions about the Media Release to establishing it as a viable and widely adopted standard. More notes on the wiki about the Media Release Working Group.

Subscribe to this weekly podcast or listen to this episode now:

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SocialMediaClub.org to Build a Community for Social Media Professionals

It’s official! The SMC launch press release is crossing the wire as I type this post.

SocialMediaClub.org (SMC) launched today for the purpose of elevating Social Media to a higher level of professionalism. The organization will bring together different groups of social media practitioners such as bloggers, podcasters, publishers, journalists, students, artists, developers, marketers, and PR professionals.

SocialMediaClub.org was formed for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. SMC was founded by Chris Heuer, serial Internet entrepreneur and executive director of the not-for-profit BrainJams.org.

According to Heuer, “This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.”

Today, SMC is hosting its inaugural event in Silicon Valley to organize its first local chapter and to begin work on the hRelease, a Microformat standard for modernizing the traditional press release for a Web-centric world. The New Media Release Google Group was established in June to discuss the future of the Press Release among PR professionals and other interested stakeholders. The meeting will move the efforts from its initial discussions, as outlined on the hRelease Wiki donated by SocialText, to deliver the initial draft of the Microformat.

Since the launch of its blog one month ago, SMC has received tremendous industry support which has enabled Heuer to expand the team with prominent industry veterans including, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, Howard Greenstein, one of the co-founders of the WWWAC List, Internet visionary Mitch Ratcliffe, Brian Solis, founder of FutureWorks, Inc. and PR2.0, Sally Falkow, president of Expansion Plus and Falkow, Inc. and in-demand speaker and author, angel advisor Timothy Taylor of Taylor, Inc., Jennifer McClure of SNCR, and many other leaders of this emerging industry.

SMC will also host several Founders Circle Events with the first series planned for New York City, London, Miami, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The half day BrainJams-styled unconferences will focus on “The Rise of Social Media” and the specific needs of each local community for establishing a local chapter of Social Media Club.

Heuer adds, “The path towards the transformation of Social Media Club from an idea and a blog into a real world community is paved with unconferences and blog posts tagged with socialmediaclub!”

The idea for Social Media Club originated in the Fall of 2005 with the Web 2point1 BrainJam. This led Heuer and his fiancée Kristie Wells to create the non-profit BrainJams organization to promote unconferences and ad-hoc collaboration to a broader audience of less technical professionals. Over the last year, BrainJams has brought together like-minded people from different backgrounds for hosted conversations about the things that matter most to participants. As a result of thousands of conversations since, the team discovered that Social Media was their true passion and deserved to be the focus of their efforts.

Heuer continued, “We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist - we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. By enabling the people who ‘get it’ to share it with others through programs like Adopt A Blogger, Social Tagging Project and dScribes, we believe that everyone touched by this industry will benefit from our efforts.”

BrainJams was established to expand the unconference movement and experiment with different formats for group conversations and social learning. In addition to promoting what is now known as “12 Five Minute Meetings” (speed dating styled networking), BrianJams also promotes “Rent an Expert” and other forms of unconferences such as the National Coalition for Deliberation and Dialogue.

Event details:
Social Media Club Meeting #1
Begins: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 at 6:00 PM
Location: 857 Maude Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043
Tags: hrelease, Social Media, socialmediaclub, Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, Howard Greenstein, Sally Falkow, Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, Brian Solis, Constantin Basturea, socialmedia, brainjams, futureworks, PR2.0, Jennifer McClure

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New Media Release #4

Chris Heuer and Brian Solis are live at SES and discuss search-engine optimization of press releases and the role of XML schemas in press releases.

The podcast can be found at the For Immediate Release site.

It’s a thriller folks.

Show notes for August 15, 2006

Welcome to NMRCast episode #4, a 23-minute podcast recorded live from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Download the file here (MP3, 15.7MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Sorry; the ability to hear a stream from this page is not available for episode #4

In This Edition:

• New Media Release wiki
• Search Engine Strategies conference
• XPRL, the eXtensible Public Relations Language
• Google Groups mailing list for New Media Release discussion (please join!)

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Social Media Club Meeting Details

We have been slammed for the last couple of weeks, achieving some great progress but not having much chance to write, but that changes this week with our first meeting on Wednesday and much more to talk about. Before getting into the week though, I wanted to get a real headcount on who is coming to the meeting on Wednesday in person, so please RSVP on this event registration page we created at Mollyguard.

If you are unable to attend in person, you can grab one of the 10 Free Conference Call spots by downloading the Meeeting Call-In Details PDF and joining us by phone at 6:30pm PST Wednesday August 16th. You can also access this call via Gizmo Project which is a Skype like VOIP product. If you join via Gizmo, follow the same instructions from the PDF.

Finally, we will be running a back channel on Internet Relay Chat. You can join us during the call, or even at many times before the call on irc.freenode.net on the #SocialMediaClub channel. If you have any questions, please comment here…

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The First Public Meeting of SMC

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Making Social Media Club More Real Than Real

Wow! I can hardly believe how much has happened over the past week, but it seems we really hit the nail on the head with Social Media Club - and for once I am on trend instead of a year ahead of it! I must be slowing down in my old age!

In the New Media Release Podcast we did yesterday, I referenced that we would be holding an organizational meeting here in the Bay Area very soon. Today I received confirmation from Seth Mazow that we will be able to use the conference room at Interplast for this meeting to be held on Wednesday August 16th from 6-8PM. For some reason I thought it was Redwood City, but their offices are actually in Mountain View. I will post the details in another post once I get the Structured Blogging setup for creating an hCal Microformat post for the event.

At the moment I am talking to people in New York, Los Angeles, London and Toronto about establishing Social Media Club in those cities. I don’t know how much they want to say about their involvement yet since we are just beginning the conversation, but I can say that great minds think alike! Many other people see the bigger picture we see and I am excited for the opportunity to come together as a community.

This is why I have always felt it so important to do this as an open community process rather than trying to claim solo ownership on this endeavour. I really don’t know what its final form will be, I just know that there must be good intentions at the core of what we do and that shared values must drive all of our actions - regardless of our political, cultural or ideological differences. It is also the reason for taking it to the streets - for getting out of Silicon Valley and emrbacing a real global perspective on this new era of our economy.

I was just Skyping with Heather Gold of Subvert fame about some of the things that are happening in the business world today. She pointed me to an article about her approach to Open Source Management which was written up in WebMonkey. I think she is onto something here - it very much feels like the sort of approach we want to take with organizing Social Media Club.

If we are to make this thing more real than real, we will need to do it together and we can learn a lot from the practices of the open source community. It looks like a few of the first ‘co-founders’ are starting to step forward - I hope they, and the others that will follow understand this ideal and choose to engage with us together rather than going it alone.

There is a world of opportunity that awaits - let’s seize upon this today and make the most of it!

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NMR Cast #3 - Wire Services

The New Media Release Podcast, episode #3 can be downloaded here, heard directly from this page, or subscribed to via the NMRCast feed. Also, the Apple iTunes subscription is now available here or by searching for NMRCast at the Apple iTunes store under “podcasts.” If you subscribe to the FIR “everything” feed, however, this podcast will not be included.

Content summary:Tom Foremski and Brian Solis join Chris Heuer and Shel Holtz for a discussion what to call this thing, how to get the profession to work together on a single product, and the role the wire services will play.

Show notes for July 31, 2006

Welcome to NMRCast episode #3, a 32-minute podcast recorded live from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Download the file here (MP3, 12.9MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

In This Edition:

• New Media Release wiki
• Chris Heuer’s post on the name of this initiative
• Google Groups mailing list for New Media Release discussion (please join!)

Chris’ Note: Again, much thanks to Shel for hosting and helping out with this initiative. Also, my apologies to Jason and Noah from theWeblogWire, which I mistakenly misidentified during the podcast.

Listen to this podcast now: