With the creation of the interim advisory board/group, it was my hope to gain some new momentum and secure a real commitment from industry leaders to collaborate for our collective benefit. From the coverage and feedback we received, it seems that we did that part well.

Now we need to turn that energy and attention into some collaborative action. So a few people in the interim advisory group have agreed to step up and help lead some initial projects. In looking at what is most important to us, it would seem most appropriate to focus our efforts on the four areas of our core mission:

1. Expand Media Literacy
2. Share Lessons Learned Among Practitioners
3. Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards
4. Promote Ethical Practices through Discussion and Actions

From here, it is important to note that anyone in the advisory group (and any member of the community) may propose projects for the club to support. Over the next few weeks we will need to formalize the governance on how we choose which projects get our formal support, but for now we are going to keep it simple and ask for your help in making these first 4 projects, that support our 4 missions a success. You can stay up to date on them here on the blog or over on the Social Media Club Special Projects page on the wiki.

Media Literacy

Michael Brito is leading an effort to find and organize all the best Introduction to Social Media presentations, classes, discussions, cartoons, videos, blog posts etc… There are a lot of ‘here is what you need to know about social media‘ lists out there as well - where are they, which ones are the best. If you have some materials to submit, or if you run across some good material, can you please join this project by submitting your introduction to Social Media materials on the Social Media Club wiki.

Sharing Lessons Learned

This one is a bit self serving as well, but important, and open. As part of The Social Media Playbook, we are building a section on Social Media Champions - the people inside of organizations who fought for engaging customers, employees and the broader market through Social Media. We are looking for champions to fill out an online interview form and will be publishing the findings on the Social Media Club blog and some of them in the book. In short, we want to discover how you overcame the objections of management, what worked for you and what didn’t. Or more simply, how did you go from weird outsider to welcomed champion? Go to the Champions project page on the wiki for more information.

Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards

John Gatrell is leading our efforts to leverage our collective expertise to further promote key industry standards such as Creative Commons, Open ID, Data Portability, the Open Web Foundation and others. He will be posting more on this project in the weeks ahead. In principle it would be great if we could do work along the lines of what Chris Messina et al did with Spread Firefox - find ways to expand awareness and explain these key standards to more everyday folks, business decision makers and others.

The first project will be in support of Creative Commons. We would like to propose a Creative Commons Awareness Day, where everyone participating writes a quick blog post about what CC means to them, how to explain it to others, what are some examples of things they have been able to do more easily because of having access to creative commons content and the challenges they have faced by people not honoring their requests for attribution etc… (there is some bad with the good, lets be honest). We have also put together a fundraising widget to help raise money for their efforts from Social Media Club Members - if you want to help us spread the campaign and start other efforts, please go to the wiki page for this project to stay up to date and contribute.

Promote Ethical Behaviour

This is tougher to get a project going in this area since it is more of a matter of discussion, but from that principle, comes the idea for our first project. We are starting a discussion about how membership in Social Media Club can serve as a ‘trusted mark’ for people to know that someone is ethical, understands social media and is committed to the advancement of the industry. There are more and more people claiming to be ’social media experts’ while more and more of us are shunning such titles, realizing we are merely practitioners who are learning more each day.

Everyone I know is concerned with what we do about the schemers and con-artists who are getting into social media with a ‘get rich quick’ mentality. How do we help people avoid those who are selling the snake oil and find those businesses, service providers and people who are really doing good work? Go to the Project Page on our Wiki and join the discussion. You should also check out this recent blog post by Kristie Wells aggregating some of the biggest ethical issues in Social Media today.

Other Projects

We are open to supporting other projects, collaborating with other groups and taking ideas for new projects related to our mission. If you are a member, we especially want to hear from you. What can we do to better serve your needs. But even if you are only an occasional reader of this blog, we want to hear from you too so we can address your needs and serve the community of social media professionals and enthusiasts.

Besides visiting the special projects pages on the wiki to get more involved, please help us get more people involved by sharing your perspective on these first projects on your own blog and helping get others involved. What it is, is up to us…