During the course of our travels over the last year, we identified several needs and developed many insights about what would make Social Media grow in positive ways. Below is a quick overview of the ideas that we hope to pursue as projects under Social Media Club:

New Media Release
This is our first project within the realm of standards. We are striving to bring together journalists, communications professionals and media creators to establish a Microformat standard for replacing the traditional press release. Join the New Media Release Google Group we have established to discuss this with others. Read some of the initial thoughts on the idea via the New PR Wiki.

BrainJams
BrainJams is actually our parent organization, but we list here, as it is an important project we are working on. BrainJams was established for the purpose of expanding the unconference movement and experimenting with different formats for group conversations and social learning. In addition to promoting what is now known as “12 Five Minute Meetings” (speed dating styled networking), we are working on “Rent an Expert” and other forms of unconferences such as the one we did with the National Coalition for Deliberation and Dialogue in August of 2006.

dScribes
Short for Digital Scribes, the idea for dScribes came through Chris Heuer’s participation in the Art of Hosting conference. It was here that Chris realized there was no need to obtain 100% participation and contribution to Social Media tools like Wiki’s. Instead, there was a need for a small number of people to fulfill key roles at conferences and other events - in short, a need for scribes to capture the essence of the conversations and the knowledge that was being shared. dScribes will be manifested as an educational program that trains people to become better note takers, photographers, videographers, bloggers, journalists, podcasters and other publishing and production related roles.

Social Tagging Project
Some semblance of this project is already being pursued by a few dedicated and passionate folks as an idea referenced as “Tagvocates“. The idea for Social Tagging Project was first hatched during a meeting between Chris Heuer and the then founding NetSquared team. Essentially, if a team of people who care about specific causes and/or topics were able to organize like paramedia in a focused effort to tag all relevant online resources, a few days efforts would benefit everyone in the community and propagate a common understanding of which tags referenced which sorts of materials. There are many important possibilities for this work which could in a sense be similar to the sort of effort put forth for Project Guttenberg.

Adopt A Blogger
Well, you can guess what this program will do. The idea came from our discussions with BrainJams in New Orleans - to formalize some practices in which many bloggers are already engaged - to help people who don’t know about blogging to learn how and make the most of the tools. More will be written on this over the coming months.