About

Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells started Social Media Club (SMC) in July 2006 to help people find all the relevant communities of interest in which they want to participate. We want to help you explore your personal and professional passions by helping you connect with a community of your peers based on both geography and areas of interest. We want to ensure that the world of Social Media does not become an echo chamber of self-reinforcing thoughts, but is instead fueled by diversity of opinion and perspective.

Social Media Club brings together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaboraters. Essentially the people who create and consume media who have an interest in seeing the ‘media industry’ evolve for everyone’s benefit. We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist - we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. Join us and let’s shape the future together!

SMC is Chris and Kristie’s labor of love. From day one, they focused on growing the organization organically as there were only two of them working on the organization on a part time basis, and each city needed to be set up with a baseline infrastructure to ensure SMC the goals of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

They could have followed BarCamp by posting a wiki page and leaving it open to anyone to host an event, whenever - but Chris and Kristie wanted to make sure these events happened more regularly (monthly) in each city, they were both informational and socially based, and at the end of the day - the learnings would then be shared back into the community for the betterment of all. Cities were launched slowly to ensure there was time and energy to support them.

Fast forward to 2009: SMC is now a handful of people managing the global organization on a part time basis, and actively working towards hiring full time staff as SMC files the 501c3 and push the organization further into the global space. Thanks to the efforts of our local leaders, we have grown to over 55 active chapters (40+ in the works) with 10’s of 1000’s of people gathering around the world. Woot!

Now, with all the woot! comes the reality SMC has fallen short on some of our goals - primarily, not connecting the groups as well as we would have liked, and we need to ensure the knowledge shared at SMC chapter events is then pushed back into the system so all can utilize. A large part of this is the infrastructure behind the scenes. Wikis are tough for some, Ning and Facebook are not the best storage sources.

In order for us to continue to grow and show value to the community - we need to finish building out the new portal that will make launching new groups easier, finding events in your local community faster, allow communications with other members, and harness the knowledge produced at each event.  The last piece (knowledge sharing) is critical - when groups are talking about a certain topic, we need to ensure there are digital scribes in the room who are then responsible for bringing that info back into the SMC ‘portal’ so other cities can then use it for their events or members can read up on what is hot in that community. This requires someone managing the global calendar and then following up with each city the day after to make sure this is being done - this is a primary role for us to fill, and we hope to have announcements on this shortly.

We are working on our Four Missions Project and are gathering volunteers to drive them forward: Media Literacy, Sharing Lessons Learned, Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards, Promote Ethical Behavior. If you are interested in helping on one or more, please add your name to the wiki and the project leader will be in touch with you.

We want SMC to become something like what David Burleigh refers to as a SIG of SIG’s (Special Interest Groups) - a sort of Switzerland inspired United Nations for the Social Media communities that already exist. In this way we can serve as a means to expand existing communities by making more people aware of what is happening. In local communities where groups with these sorts of interests have not yet organized, members can help plant the seeds and start their own communities, or leverage the assets of Social Media Club for doing so.

SMC has been extremely fortunate over the last three years to have people believe in the organization and support it via paid memberships to allow us to continue to grow. To all of you who have contributed so far, thank you, thank you, thank you.  It means the world to us.

Stay tuned for more to come. As Timbuk3 likes to sing - SMC’s future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades…