Social Media Club says “Hello World”

New York’s most recent Social Media Club meeting put itself out there for all to see. Howard Greenstein, the organization’s co-founder, has gone “all-in” to borrow a Texas Hold’em poker expression, leaving his day job to pursue this full-time.

The Social Media Club (SMC) was presented as the second disruptive wave after the World Wide Web in the mid 90’s. Coincindentally, Howard and the author of this report were founding members of the WWWAC, the World Wide Web Artists’ Consortium back in the day, and this organization, as such, has a similar feel to it.
SMC is designed to assist its members in leveraging their online and in-person relationships, building upon credentials, and shared knowledge within the group, as well as reaching out to the local communities, schools and not-for-profits. One of their programs is to have members “adopt a blogger” and help them get on the right track online.

To be clear, this is a membership organization running as a “not-for-loss” and there is a dues structure, which can be found here: http://socialmediaclub.org/membership. The stated benefits of being a member are: a social network, discounts to industry conferences and organization
Discounts, and of course a t-shirt and other organization paraphernalia. The intent is that the organization be funded by the members for the members.

The mantra for SMC: “Stop telling people they don’t get it, and them get it, by building a broader understanding, establishing standards and ethical guidelines. Throughout all of the SMC meetings I have attended the concepts of transparency and disclosure have been made paramount.

In a period of 4 months, 800 more than1000 people have met in 8 cities around the United States, with four more locations coming on board: Dallas, Austin, Atlanta and South Florida.
This New York meeting was held on the premises of Fleishman Hillard, a leading Public Relations firm. David Bradfield, Senior VP and leader of its Digital Team had been the only member of the group to put agenda items on the wiki, so he was able to set the agenda. He served as one of the meeting’s facilitators putting forth the evening’s agenda:

* What tools are people using to track Social Media Content?
* What is the perception of Social Media? What matters most?
* Is Social Media redefining Advertising, Public Relations & Marketing?

Tools:

Even with 40+ people in attendance it became readily apparent that the environment fostering Social Media and Web 2.0 development is still so new to so many. The responses to what tools are being used barely scratched the surface: News Readers (Ranchero’s NetNewsWire, Google’s Reader, and EspRSSo), followed up by:

Touchstone - http://www.touchstonelive.com - Stay Informed Without Getting
Distracted

and

Netvibes - http://www.netvibes.com - Personalied news, data feeds, pod and video
casts aggregated on personal website.

All of the above are worthy of merit, I (David) was just struck by such a small list and the lack of vocal enthusiasm on the part of the attendees to champion their respective favorites. Time to stop preaching to the choir. We are far from a common toolset and as for barriers to entry, let’s just agree that they are not physical.

From the assemblage it was clear that both measurement and metrics in a Social Media/Web 2.0 world are wholly subjective. People were hard pressed to agree on how to gauge success, let alone what constitutes it. For those of you reading this who do “get it,” understand that you are clearly in the minority and that there exists such a chasm - the size and scope of the Grand Canyon lends itself to understatement.

Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations are three wholly distinct and separate discipines. This is what I was told and had drummed into my head growing up. Well, these times are a changing. There’s a mad scramble for all these folks to establish their footholds and much like the automobile industry, there definitely will be more hybrid organizations encompassing the three disciplines. It will be interesting to see who runs out of gas first.

The evening was capped off by the attendees breaking into small clusters and banging on about authenticity online. Four distinct groups with their own take.
Here is a sampling:

• The environment is self correcting, and the audience will decide for itself
• Disclosure above and beyond all, maintain relevance, manage thresholds
• Online journalism become the new traditional media
• Greater emphasis on friends and colleagues to prioritize and legitimize

FWIW

David says: I am not sure I trust the general public, or more aptly the audience. There are a lot of television programs that I liked, which got cancelled due to ratings, and more than enough trial verdicts I wish were overturned. The idea of bloggers as journalists and as our “new media” is indeed evolutionary, even revolutionary, but do you really want to have just anybody be your messenger? The idea that we are now relying on our friends and colleagues to help us sift through what is and what is not speaks volumes as to how overwhelming this has become.

The online video space has come full circle. Much like television in the 1950’s, a whole new generation is re-discovering this visual medium and how it can be exploited. Media people are elated. The Internet has doubled back a point in time, a paradigm, which they not only understand, but can sell, albeit in much smaller chunks.

Thank You, Boston and good night!

Thanks very much to the folks at Social Media Club in Boston for allowing me to present the other night. Special thanks to IDG Network World for hosting the event, and to Todd Van Hoosier and the folks from Topaz Partners for organizing the event .

As part of the meeting Computerworld Senior Online Projects Editor Ian Lamont showed us Sharkbait, which is a user-generated content site (or a forum, depends on how you view it) where readers of ComputerWorld can submit items for discussion about “tech tidbits”, difficult situations, crazy bosses, and those zany users (you know, the ones who use the CDRom drive as a coffe cup holder). There are some interesting anecdotes there already, and the site just went live a few weeks ago.

Ian also noted, based on a question by John Kass, that Computerworld writers who blog are also responding to comments on non-IDG, non-Computerworld blogs, and are finding info from user blogs and highlighting them on their own site. In otherwords, they’ve joined the discussion. Good to know.
Several folks have blogged about the event. John Kass wondered first if Boston Companies have the zing for Social Media. He follows up his own piece with more data here.

David M. Scott reviews the discussion of the Social Media Release at his blog.

Boston organizer Todd Van Hoosier recorded the full audio of the meeting in these two blog posts - part1  & part2.

As promised, here is a link to a PDF of my slides from the other night.

Someone asked me if I would post my raw notes of Todd Defern’s talk on the Social Media Press Release. I’ve included them below. They are in draft form - done for my use, and errors are my own.  The good thing is, if you want to really hear this, you can listen to the meeting in the posts above from Todd Van Hoosier.

More info about the SM Release here.

Sm Release
Todd Defern, Shift Communications.
Everyone hates press releases. But 3k go out a day.
Of the thousands of articles a day published in the media, <3% come from press releases.

Die Press release blog post by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher.

Basic Principles for the Press release SMR
-    to democratize access to them.  Most people who can get full content are credentialed journalists with access to Marketwire or PR Newswire.
-    But you may want bloggers, etc. to read your release, or hobbyists, or etc.
o    Remove the barriers to access
-    Ensure accuracy
o    Pfizer drug launch
-    Embrace Context
o    Anyone writing about you will search, digg, del.icio.us,
•    If you were a company you could put a delicious site out there and put your own opinion about this stuff
o    Tagging – word of mouth client, they bookmarked every one of the articles about w of m, and tagged them, and collected them.
•    PR people giving CONTEXT around the things they’re writing
-    Building community
o    If you release with tags for technorati search. They won’t just see news about your stuff, they’ll see the conversation AROUND THAT TAG
•    YOU’RE putting yourself out there and embracing community
-    Be find-able
o    Social media optimization
These releases end up as sort of mini-website, made accessible, given content that can be shared,

Novell did an SM release on a day with 10 releases – that release was the least newsworthy but got the most hits

Belkin, Symphony, Novell,
PR-squared.com

4 professors in schools are teaching SM Release

Other folks have put up similar but not same things, but almost exactly the same.

What’s the resistance to this? IR, Legal?
Todd: Most frequent question – should I put out both traditional release and an SM release?  2x cost
David scott – if you just want to reach media – do an old style one. If you want to reach buyers, be in search engines, etc – do an SM release.

Eventually will be called SM News Release or just ‘a news release.’

These new releases won’t go to many of the media company feeds, etc – in the current system.

Will this bypass trad. Media and bloggers and lose credibility –

Where will these releases live?
Client site, PR firm, wire services

Reaction –
Todd: overall positive from journalists, mixed from pr folks, bloggers and influencers – 250 posts about this, only 13 negative
Music and arts folks love this – they can put out clips of what they do as part of it

Cow Dung and Concentric Circle Theory

There are some good elements from Eric Rice’s article here about how comments and criticism change in tenor like the different wave sizes/wavelengths of the ripple of a stone thrown in a pond. (thanks to C.C. Chapman for the link to his article).

A few excerpts:

My previous post on income levels and the Long Tail had been brewing in my mind for a while, and finally found a place to jump out due to the latest observations about the comments on Amanda Congdon’s recent segment on ABCNews.com about cow dung as sustainable fuel….

He then talks about how the comments about the article can go from useful or relevant close to the context of where the story was reported, to less useful or more snarky/vicoious as you get farther away.

…

Metafilter and Valleywag are two examples of access-controlled content (need an invite), as opposed to the wide-open form of digg.com and tech news forum, Slashdot, considered by many to be much higher on the level of snark for snark’s sake.

It’s another simple example of content that starts from a different place, existing in a much wider space, getting criticized with a different intent. In fact, the commenter responsible for the comment above was the only one who commented on the actual topic of the video…

This piece is worth a read – it is tough to cut excerpts and still get the sense of it.

The comments make it even a better piece, as others have posted thoughts or disagreed.

IT Conversations podcast about Web2.0 and Social Media Mashups

Today I’m one of the guests in the featured podcast on the front page of IT Conversations. A direct link to the piece is here.

In this podcast I interview Jamais Cascio, and we talk about Social Media, Web 2.0, Mashups, and how they ‘break’ existing value networks.
This piece was recorded about 6 months ago at MeshForum but it is still relevant.

Thanks to Michael Pinto for letting me know.

Scoble Interviews John Chambers

At CES, Robert Scoble interviews John Chambers of Cisco.
Some good comments by Chambers on simplicity and making things easy for customers. Discussions on moving video around etc, and “any device, any application.” Always interesting considering Cisco owns Scientific Atlanta (cable box and IPTV systems) as well as Linksys (home networking).

Chambers says Cisco can be one of the ‘biggest players in the home market.’ (He also says to Scoble : “Tell Bill Gates your friend, and Steve Ballmer, we want to partner with them.”  (I know Scoble is connected, but don’t you think Bill takes John Chambers’ phone calls?)

The end of the interview has some discussion of social media, about 7:20 min into it.

I haven’t seen Chambers like this before. Excellent interview.

SMC Phoneix covered in AZ Republic

Francine Hardaway, one of the organizers for Social Media Club in Phoenix, Arizona, us this link to an article in the Arizona Republic about their recent Social Media Club meeting.

An excerpt:

If podcasts, wikis, blogs, and vlogs sound like sci-fi movie characters to you, you are not alone.

Yet even the handful of the 40 or so attendees at a recent Social Media Club-Phoenix meeting who could not define these Internet communication methods saw the value in learning about them.

“It’s where things are going,” said Rex Reynolds of HQ Quotes LLC. He said he attended to learn how to market his business and receive more immediate public feedback through online communication like blogs or online journals.

But the key item in the article for me was this:

He said he saw the meeting as a free tutorial. “The intellectual capital in this room is amazing,” he said.

Yes. This is what we see in every meeting in every chapter that is running for Social Media Club. The power of the group to teach, train, inform, and assist others for the benefit of all.

Merry Christmas to those who are celebrating today, and Happy Holidays to everyone!

UPDATE: This link takes you to the Phoenix event page for January, if you want to sign up for the meeting.

Quick 5 minute Audio - “What is Social Media?”

Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology.com did an audio interview with me (scroll down a little bit) on the floor of the NY XPO last month. The audio quality is a little scratchy because it was a trade show floor of over 10,000 people, but you can find me answering some basic questions around “What is Social Media,” “Why is Social Media relevant to a small business person” and “Are Blogs just for Geeks?”

Social Media Club NY January Meeting

Our next meeting will be January 23rd at Fleishman Hillard.

Here’s the link to register.

We’ll be accepting topics for the agenda over on the Wiki page.

I hope to see you there!

Keep your friends close and…

The old saying from Sun-Tzu’s Art of War is “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
But on Social Networks, some folks like to create fake friends, and that’s earning them enemies. Bruce Schneier posts today about a service that creates fake friends on MySpace and other SN sites. (Thanks and link back to Pito Salas of the excellent BlogBridge RSS aggregator tool for the pointer).

It seems “Fake Your Space” (no link because they don’t deserve the search engine points) allows you to have fake friends on SN sites that look pretty and send you fake notes about having great fake times.

I guess I’m making an obvious assumptions about the value of popularity contests - ie that I don’t like them. But this goes deeper than that.
The comments on Bruce’s site are wonderful too. Someone noted “If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?”

My favorite is:

Yes, Mike is smart guy. We need reputation management.

There’s some great reading over at First Monday  by the very talented Danah Boyd on how people choose friends on social networks. From the abstract:

“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network sites. Participants must select who on the system they deem to be ‘Friends.’ Their choice is publicly displayed for all to see and becomes the backbone for networked participation. By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture of the sites. 

Good reading, and well thought out.

Other folks I like to read include Terrell Russell at ClaimId who talks about how to “claim” your online ID and ensure that you are managing what info is available about you online.
Social Media Club management is working on some ways that people can show they are who they say they are, and create verified reputations. We’ll work with, and support, those who are working on OpenId and other great efforts. I don’t want to announce vapor or anything, just put out an intent on our part to make the situation better.

It’s also a great topic for future Social Media Club monthly meetings, in any of the 10 or so places we’re meeting now.