The Social Media Club Member Badge++

I am very excited to publicly announce this great new member benefit, which we produced with Chris Carfi and his excellent team from Cerado.  Chris calls it a “Ventana” but I think of it as a “nano-site”, being about the size of an iPod Nano, but also being smaller then what you would call a “mico-site”.  Some other folks think of it as a “site in a widget”.  However you think of it, we think you will call it cool.

As a benefit for Professional Members and business members, we are able to use this new member badge to help promote you.  In particular, we go through all of the blog posts written by members each weekday to select the most relevant posts on social media related topics, which then get featured inside the badge.

We also have included a members directory of professional members and above with links to each members blog.  In essence, it is a blog roll of our members, helping drive traffic to those who are working to support our common missions. If you have been holding off on joining as a Professional member, now is a great time to join us and help Social Media Club become the foremost organization of Social Media professionals and those seeking to learn.

Perhaps of greatest interest is the addition of our Social Media Club Events Calendar in which members can feature any social media related event you want to promote by simply filling out the form offered on the bottom of the events calendar page.

Finally, we are also featuring books written by our members along with a few other very important social media books that we believe every social media professional should read.

This is just the first of many more member’s benefits to come, and we think it is a terrific one that is right in the spirit of what we have always tried to do, work together to promote the good works of each other.

So if you want to stay up on all the latest and greatest from Social Media Club and our members, simply check out their sites.  Or if you prefer, you can read the best blog posts from our member’s each day on your iPhone by visiting http://iphone.socialmediaclub.org/

Members, please note, if your name links to an incorrect blog, please send us an updated address to socialmediaclub [at] gmail.com so we can correct - simply reply to the email I sent you last week with the correct info, or leave it here in the comments - this is why I asked for your current address a short while ago.

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Social Media Club: Chapter Launches

Are you interested in launching Social Media Club in your local city?  Need a little help growing your existing chapter? On the hunt for interesting topics?

Join us on our weekly chapter call where we answer questions around what is needed to launch Social Media Club in your local city, how to develop awareness campaigns, discuss topics/conversations that have worked well in other chapters, securing sponsorships, and so much more. The calls take place every Wednesday, and alternate weekly - between 8am PST and 5pm PST. An updated schedule is available online in the Social Media Club events calendar. We know these times are not ideal for the International crowd, so feel free to email kristie [at] socialmediaclub.org to schedule an alternate time as needed.

The conference call info is as follows:

Conference Dial-in Number: (269) 320-8400
Access Code: 509633#

We will be recording each call, so if you are not able to join us live - feel free to take a listen when time allows:

Playback Number: (269) 320-8499
Access Code: 509633#

We recently launched an official chapter launch guide, and encourage everyone to review these BEFORE you join the call so we all have a baseline to work from:

• See if your city is already meeting
• SMC Chapter Guidelines
• SMC Founder, Chris Heuer, also interviewed SMC Louisville Chapter Leader, Jason Falls, recently on Organizing a Local Social Media Club. This is a 30-minute podcast, please take a listen.

We have seen a bit of of pick up in requests to launch Social Media Club chapters as of late, and we will start posting a monthly update on what cities are ‘in the works’ to keep everyone posted. To get us current, here is where we are:

OCTOBER:

• Chapter Launches: Chicago, IL (USA) - Indianapolis, IN (USA) - Las Vegas, NV (USA)
• Planning Meetings (preparing for launch): Charlotte, NC (USA) - Honolulu/Waikiki, HI (USA) - London (UK)

NOVEMBER:

• Chapter Launches: Atlanta, GA (USA) - San Diego, CA (USA)
• Planning Meetings (preparing for launch): Jacksonville, FL (USA)

DECEMBER:

• Chapter Launches: London (UK)
• Planning Meetings (preparing for launch): Detroit/Ann Arbor, MI (USA) - New Orleans, LA (USA) - Orlando, FL (USA) - Portland, OR (USA) - Tampa, FL (USA) - Toronto, ON (Canada) - Tucson, AZ (USA)

JANUARY:

• Chapter Launches: Salt Lake City, UT (USA)
• Planning Meetings (preparing for launch): TBD

To find out information on your city launch and/or planning meetings, please visit the SMC Wiki and click on the city nearest you.

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NO Local Chapter call this week

Based on feedback we received around the Chapter Launch Guidelines documents (at the bottom of the Local Team wiki page), we would like to make some changes to it before we jump on another call.

This means there will NOT be a call tomorrow (Wednesday, November 5th).

We will resume our weekly call schedule NEXT week, starting on Wednesday, November 12th at 8:00am PST.

We will post the new document to this site once it is ready along with the conference call information and appreciate your understanding and your patience.

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Feature your video or presentation on SocialMediaClub.org

Would you like to have your presentation featured on the home page of Social Media Club? We are looking for the best educational materials on all things related to Social Media (web 2.0, community, new marketing, pr 2.0 and other related materials). Please let us know it exists by adding a link to it in the comments below along with a short description.

When reviewing our media literacy program with Michael Brito the other day, we hit upon another potentially big idea for this important spot on the home page, a weekly course focused on a different strategy or tactic.  By this I mean that one week we could feature a new presentation/video each day on the same topic , such as Blogger Relations.  In this case, we would look for someone (hello members!) to put together an online ‘course’ on these topics that has five lessons in it.

What do you think? How might we do something like this best? Are there any pieces of free or SaaS software out there we could use in conjunction with this program? Please let us know!

PS - we are also starting to develop our webinar program and need help in selecting a vendor.  We will be posting separately on this program, but since it is related, thought I should mention that here as well.

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SMC Members: We need your current blog URL

If you are a paid member of Social Media Club (including student/non profit members), please go ahead and post your current blog below in the comments. We are doing something very cool to help promote each of you, but it seems that we don’t have blog addresses for everyone. If you don’t get it to us now, you can always update it later, but I think you will be happier if you do it now…

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Social Media Club: A short history, a long and bright future

When Chris and I started Social Media Club (SMC) two+ years ago, we understood growth was going to be more organically based as there were only two of us working on the organization on a part time basis, and we needed to set up each city with a baseline infrastructure to ensure we met our goals of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

We could have followed BarCamp by posting a wiki page and leaving it open to anyone to host an event, whenever - but we wanted to make sure these events happened more regularly (monthly), they were both informational and socially based, and at the end of the day - the learnings would then be shared back into our community for the betterment of all. We realized early on, we needed to set some guidelines and then oversee the chapters to ensure we were meeting our goals. We had to manage it.

Fast forward to 2008: we are now a handful of people managing the global organization on a part time basis, and actively working towards hiring full time staff as we file our 501c6 and push SMC further into the global space. Thanks to the efforts of our local leaders, we have grown to over 25 active chapters with 10’s of 1000’s of people gathering around the world. Woot!

Now, with all the woot! comes the reality we have fallen short on some of our goals - primarily, not connecting the chapters as well as I 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 chapters 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 to me - when chapters 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 portal so other chapters can then use it for their chapters 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 me to fill, and I hope to have announcements on this shortly.

We are also 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.

SMC has been extremely fortunate over the last two 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…

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Orange sponsors the Social Media Club France

Great news just arrived from Europe today: Orange is now officially the first annual sponsor of the Social Media Club France.
By supporting the French SMC chapter throughout the 2008-2009 season, and with several SMC active members coming from its ranks, Orange contributes significantly to the definition and the diffusion of best practices in the social media industry. Being now backed by a major organization, the Social Media Club will be able to accelerate its development in France and Europe: events will be organized on a more regular basis, intern or part-time worker will be hired, new projects will be launched,…

Again, many thanks to Orange for its trust and its support.

For any info on the Social Media Club France and its future / past events, please visit our wiki section or contact Pierre-Yves Platini (pyplatini at gmail dot com).

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4 Missions, 4 Projects: Social Media Club Gets to Work

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…

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And the 42nd Interim SMC Board Member…

… is also being joined by the 43rd and 44th. I am very proud to report that Aaron Strout, Coach Deb (Deb Micek) and Chris Hambly were the top vote getters with 383 for Aaron, 340 for Deb and 179 for Chris (who barely edged out Maddie Grant who had 166).

Why did we decide to expand to 44 from 42? It is simple. No one wanted to do a run off and have to go shill for votes all weekend - and that certainly wasn’t what I intended it to be. So, this morning I asked the interim board what we should do. By a narrow margin, we determined we should simply ask the top three vote getters if they were ok with bringing them all into the interim board and they agreed. In fact, seeing Deb and Aaron joke about it in the comments is what persuaded me this morning.

Unfortunately, there were some technology troubles: the corporate proxy servers prevented some of the candidate’s supporters from voting at work (so sorry); there were intermittment failures to accept votes in the last hours and probably four or five more problems with using Democracy Poll for an attempt at democracy. More importantly, we learned an important requirement of our member community software, which we will be designing collaboratively. We really need a good community system with one member, one vote software and special discussion pages for discussing the merits of the candidates of our formal organization and for the local groups.

Still, I think the overall effort was a success in demonstrating we really are going to be an open organization that will remain unwavering in our commitment to fairness and serving the greater needs of the Social Media community / industry. There was some good discussion about whether we should sustain the process we originally outlined so as to show that we keep our word. I think it is more important to respect the people inside the process and to admit mistakes, make corrections and move on to whats important.

To that end, it was never our intention to use this election process as a link building exercise. The original 41 were selected upon three critiera - merit, willingness to contribute a few hours each month and trust. I chose people I know who really understand what is happening in social media, would commit to contributing (more then just attention) and share some of the key values we hold (despite disagreeing with some of them on other topics). Some were members, others woud have been if I asked (or could have gone through the formality of signing up for a free Open Membership).

To be clear, my intention here is to get Social Media Club organized and heading in the right direction for the benefit of the community. It is to ensure the values of openness, honesty and willingness to engage in the conversation remain at the core of what we do and what we promote. It is to get other people than myself engaged, activated and working on behalf of our common cause. It is to get Social Media Club running as a self-sustaining community organization, being lead by other self-directed people who want to do good and are willing to work with others in the community to do more good together.

So the bottom line here is that we really want this to be an organization, of, by and for the people who share an interest in social media and its “greater significance.” The election was an attempt at an open democratic process. By agreeing to expand the size and skip the run off is just one other such example of listen, consider, converse and act, then repeat.

I for one, am very glad we did this process as I got to meet a bunch of new people who are doing good work in Social Media. We also accomplished some goals, we learned a lot, we picked up some momentum and we are getting a chance to grow. We also ended up with what seems to be three really great social media professionals, which is ultimately a wealth of riches more then we could have hoped for.

We have a lot of work to do from here, which we will begin blogging about on Monday. Though several interim board members are already underway on projects.

In the mean time join me in welcoming Aaron Strout, Coach Deb and Chris Hambly. I am looking forward to working with each of you.

PS - We will be doing something more with the other 35 folks nominated as well as those who paid for CoFounder memberships. One of the first tasks of the interim board is to consider how it is being structured, the language we are using and dividing up the work on the things we want to get done.

Update: corrected spelling of Chris Hambly’s last name

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Vote for the 42nd Interim Board Member

Wow! The response to our mistake has been overwhelming.  While we have much work to do, our first task is to figure out how to best harness this outpouring of energy.  We have enough work to do and projects that need help to get everyone involved who wants to be involved - particularly when it comes to educational initiatives and organizing collaborative projects.

Due to the size of the response, (38 34 p