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.

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