I’m blogging today with the intent of showing you that joining Social Media Club, today- now, when you’re reading this - is a good idea. I’m not asking just because we’re on a membership drive - though we are. It’s because we want people who care about Social Media, media creation, and the community, to join us and help us create the club. We want to inspire you to join in our conversation. And being a member is a good way to do that.

Social Media club is dedicated to helping the pioneers in many diverse fields, from Marketing and PR to Designers, Web Developers, Journalists and Technologists – and those boundary-spanners who fit many of these categories at once – learn from each other, share their emerging techniques and expand each other’s capacity to contribute back to the community. The conversations in which we partcipated with the various Social Media Club ‘chapters’ in different cities have shared one common attribute – the participation of highly intelligent people asking great questions and talking openly about what they know for the benefit of all those in the room, and all those in the larger community.

If that kind of intelligent inquiry and dialogue sound appealing, consider joining us now and contribute your perspective in this crucial phase of our development.

Today more than ever, the tools of media creation have become simpler and easier, and now almost anyone with desire, knowledge and access can create and widely distribute media – from print to audio to video. The increasing popularity of blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and shared video content is shifting our attention from the previously dominant forms of mass media and people are consuming and producing social media. From Flickr to YouTube and World of Warcraft to Second Life, people are meeting likeminded individuals for the purpose of creating ad-hoc groups, sharing resources, and building personally relevant communities of passion and purpose.

With the ever accelerating pace of change, the big question today is how can we understand these worlds, and these media, in the broader context of our society? Just 100 years ago, most people didn’t have their own phones, and would never travel more than a few miles from their homes. Now, we travel around the globe overnight and visit other, virtual places at the hundreds of Kbps (YMMV). Fifty years ago, computers were as big as a small house, today they fit in the palm of your hand. Your Treo or Blackberry has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. There is more content on Google than has been written in the entire history of our society from biblical times to the late 20th century (ok, I can’t prove that, but it sounds about right).

Why the history lesson? It’s to serve as a reminder that we’ve come a far distance in a short period of time. On the Web, individuals, developers, grandparents, young children, and marketers are all still learning how to properly engage and make the most of our amazing innovations. When the Web was born, none of us knew the direction things would take. However, those who knew to look back through historical lessons, found great insights from Usenet, the boards and forums of Compuserve, Genie, Prodigy, the BBSes, Desktop Publishing and the development of email.

Together, these provide valuable context and key indicators of direction. The net was about communication – routable, scalable TCP/IP yes, but more important than protocols and packets were the connections that formed between people.

Those who have found a way to facilitate the conversation (yes, as in “Markets are Conversations” see: The Cluetrain Manifesto for details) have survived boom and bust to lead the next phase of the web’s evolution. Amazon, Ebay, and Egroups (which became Yahoo Groups) are all examples of places where passionate people would gather together to talk about their common interests, and to share what they knew with their peers.

We have another opportunity here - one to shape the future of the next wave. If you’re very inspired by what we plan to do, consider joining at the Co-Founder level and really help us get the resources we need to build out Social Media Club’s infrastructure to support the real world gatherings and online connections that will bring the many diverse groups of people interested in this new industry together.

It is our intention and our promise to build the Social Media Club organization to fully serve the community of passionate media creators and consumers, as individuals and as organizations, with the same spirit with which participatory media is growing - of, by and for the people. We look forward to building something extraordinary and world changing, with you by our side.

Watch for my next post on the member value proposition.