Social Media Club NY Wrapup

I’ve attempted to take some rough notes of the meeting. As I was also actively participating, some of my notes are admittedly incomplete. Please feel free to add your own notes via the comments or point towards your blog. Also, please feel free to expand and amplify the discussion.

Meeting notes (very rough):

Introductions

Chris Heuer introduced himself, gave brief background on the genesis of Social Media Club and of BrainJams.

Howard Greenstein (that’s me) gave a brief backgrounder as well.

Chris discussed the following:
Web 2.0 – less a technology or a thing and more a spirit of rebirth, a sharing culture. Social Media is inclusive rather than exclusive. These ideas lead to the genesis of the Web 2.1 conference opposite the Web 2.0 conference.

In SMC we want to connect people from diverse communities and help them learn from each other.

3 main ideas:

1. Promote media literacy – general population, schools, underserved communities, etc.

2. Share best practices

3. Promote ethics and standards. One standard we’re working on is the hRelease/New Media Release. As part of this, Chris attended the XPRL meeting in London last week.

The group then discussed resources available to them in NY – Other groups or events.

Bar Camp NY

Next NY

Meetups (New Technology ones, as well as others (Russian language, etc. )

We discussed ideas for future meetings:

1. More about the non SM literate communities – how we can reach out to them, etc. Someone asked if when we mention these communities we were considering both the computer users who were not SM literate, and those who had limited or no online access – yes for both.
2. SM club as part of schools. We had a discussion about how we could best reach out to Schools – NYMouse.org, other groups
3. Someone would love to see the group share volunteering opportunities
4. An entreprenur has been asked to create an SM site for a 2008 campaign and wants to know how Social media will affect the public discourse around the election, and other public events.

We then got into a discussion about information overload. There are many, numerous different kinds of tools for Social Media, and many web 2.0 services. To which ones should we pay attention?

Discussion of Feed Readers, how many feeds and inputs can people handle?

Someone mentioned Berry Bloglines as a way to read feeds on the Blackberry mobile device.

We then moved to a discussion of Podcasts, and how many of them people can and actually do consume. Many good podcasts mentioned:
A few: Dr. Floyd, Podshow Music Rewind, Gillmor Gang, Jim Leher News Hour, etc. Debate (with Googling) of how many people listen to or have tried podcasts, and how to measure. Also, how much to measure vs micro or narrow casting. Discussion of narrow casting vs spray and pray large audience advertising - which works better?

Moved into a discussion of the Social Media Release/hRelease format. Points included some first and second hand accounts of how Journalists actually use and consume releases, what they would need to adopt a new format. Discussion of what to include in a release. Someone noted that the press release may just be one part of a much larger campaign, and ability to show people the associated ads, products, campaign material could be quite beneficial both to the company issuing the release as well as to the journalist or especially the blogger who is trying to put the release into context for a story. Feeing that Bloggers and Citizen Journalists more than journalists might benefit from the New Media Release format. Additional discussion ensued.

The next meeting will be announced with location shortly. Thanks to all who showed up, and to BusinessWire for hosting the event!

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