Join us Today for Social Media Club Hour - a Show on Blog Talk Radio

After speaking with Lisa Padilla from Blog Talk Radio and Mike McGrath from Tacit Partners (also one of of the Silicon Valley chapter leaders) at last week’s Silicon Valley gathering, we decided to move forward with a new show for Social Media Club on Blog Talk Radio. In a short while, at 10am PST today on Friday August 31, we will be doing the first episode, with Robert Scoble as our special guest.

This show’s focus is Authenticity, Credibility and Authority in Social Media. From my personal perspective, I was thinking that the blessings of our tool’s capabilities for instant publishing have the potential to be a curse. Of course, I experienced a somewhat funnier (and slightly different) version of this double edged sword last week, showing up on Valleywag for a short video interview I did which was dubbed “Geeks Gone Wild“. In agreeing to do an on camera interview for a topic I was not prepared to really discuss, I ended up looking a bit silly, requiring me to do several hours of research and writing to clearly illuminate what I was trying to say. Of course video is completely different from writing, but it is an interesting parallel in some ways, especially in light of the need to do so much research in forming a coherent explanation of my point.

In the early days of the Web, when email was just going mainstream, we used to talk about the need to walk away for a bit after writing something important to consider what was written and come back to it with fresh eyes. I don’t hear that discussion all that often around Blogging - whether it is reporting, opinion or deeper thought pieces. While everyone is different, there are clearly many who think that the key to success in Blogging is publishing first and fast to “just get it out there”. I have had several discussions with Robert Scoble about this over the last couple years and I think this is going to be a great talk today, delving into the deeper issues surrounding the importance of “how we approach our use of social media tools”.

While we still need to figure things out with regards to the show’s format, I think this is going to be a great experiment and ongoing effort of the club. It begins to move forward one of my original visions for the club - finding ways for those of us who care about Social Media to collaborate globally in an effort to share best practices and learn from one another. We are approaching this show differently than others you may have seen out there - each episode will be hosted by a different person from one of our many Social Media Club chapters around the world… So in essence, the members of the club will be creating this show together!

So join us today for the Social Media Club Hour on Blog Talk Radio, and call in even to share your thoughts, we would love to hear from you!

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BarCamp’s 2nd Anniversary Block Party!

I registered for BarCampBlock the other day on Facebook, forgetting that this was probably an event promotional venue rather than an event registration activity. Fortunately for me I follow Tara on Twitter where I learned that a) BarCampBlock was TechCrunch’d today and b) they ran out of spots and c) that she added more openings to the real Eventbrite registration page. Thankfully I just registered Kristie and myself for next weekend’s festival-like knowledge sharing event, so I will be there and so should you.

As I have said too many times to count, my experience at Gnomedex and BarCamp in the summer of 2005 were milestone moments in my life. It inspired me to launch BrainJams(woefully out of date), to learn the Art of Hosting and to ultimately start Social Media Club to help bring the spirit or open knowledge sharing and peer to peer/ informal learning to a wider audience outside of the technology community. To the degree that I know we have made a difference in many people’s lives through personal conversations with them, we have been a success. It seems that we are just beginning to realize a more sizable impact in terms of the numbers of people we empower with this thinking, essentially in the midst of the multi-year overnight success process.

To further my personal crusade to teach businesses why they should cultivate sharing cultures and host market conversations for creating successful market engagement, I am going to be leading a session at BarCampBlock entitled “Why Intention Matters to your Business“. The short summary of my thesis is: while the value a company provides customers with their product/service is paramount, selling it to exploit the market and separate people from their money will never create the most successful result or maximize long term profitability.

So I hope to see you at BarCampBlock, and hopefully to get a chance to talk to you about a new form of BI, Business Intention…

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Social Media Club: August Events

While some local groups are taking summer break, several others are meeting this month. Keep the conversation going at these local events near you:

Social Media Club August - Denver: August 7, 2007
Guest speaker is Brad Feld

Social Media Club - San Francisco: August 9, 2007
Guest speakers include Evan Hansen (Wired News), Chris Tolles (Topix) and Kevin Rose (Digg.com)

Social Media Club - Seattle: August 16, 2007
We\’ll be discussing \’Does Seattle need a Social Media Club?\’

Social Media Club - Austin: August 23, 2007
Guest speaker is William Hurley, aka “whurley”, Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, Inc. and he\’ll be discussing Open Source, Social Media and the Art of Community.

Social Media Club - Silicon Valley: August 23, 2007
Guest speakers include Steve Huffman from Reddit, Jay Adelson from Digg, and Amy Dalton from Topix

Social Media \’Breakfast\’ Club - Boston: August 29, 2007
It’ll be good food (lots of bacon), and good conversation (lots of bacn).

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