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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Recap: What is the biggest ethical issue we face in Social Media today

I recently posted this ethical issue question that was brought up during the kick off meeting of SMC Los Angeles and received some interesting feedback. This responses below have been shortened, to read the responses in their entirety, please check out the original post for the top half, the others came via Twitter responses.

What is the biggest ethical question we face in Social Media today?:

• Vijay Goel, M.D. - Impact anonymity has to impact the digital reputation of others, especially where they have not opted in to that discussion.
• SeLiNa - Firms who misrepresent themselves online and try to deceive people by not being up front about their campaign activity, and pretending to be “user” and not a marketer.
• Kari Rippetoe - Do people who post information about themselves online have any expectation of privacy? Should social media sites play a larger role in ensuring the privacy of their users?
• Gfox - I think information sharing vs. keeping. We’re all about ’sharing’ except when it comes to our monetization secrets.
• Albert Maruggi - (1) Gaming the SEO system to gain rank, (2) underhanded manipulation of product reviews and comments, (3) the accumulation of friends with the intention of monetizing them.
• wayzgoose - (1) Exposure and (2) using social groups for promotion of ideology, business, or personal exploitation.
• Shawn Scott - Protecting free speech as it relates to transparency.
• Roxanne Darling - Competition for mind share.
• krash63 - Widening the net to listen to more voices.
• Chris Heuer - How do we give bad actors in the ecosystem (exploitative, manipulative, dishonest, rude, etc…) a bad reputation that is more visible for others to know who to take seriously and who to ignore?
• Steve Nimmons - Use of Social Media as a propaganda machine for some rather nefarious groups.
• Tom At The Home Business Archive - People tend to add people as friends to monetize them and also submit their own content to the all the sites, and every single blog post they write.
• tmarklein - Blurring of lines between “edit” and “advertising” — seems antiquated and important at same time.
• jamieortiz  - Transparency –educating CEOs to be honest in posts and comments.
• ShannonRenee - Purposeful misrepresentation of one’s self.
• gylonj - Honesty
• CandyLynn - Truth & honesty
• GILL_Media - What’re the limits of marketing as community participation? What’s the divide between spam and promotion to receptive ears?
• jljohansen - Inconsistant definitions of ethics. We aren’t on the same page, or even in the same book.
• NancyMarmolejo - Spammers!
• LewisG - Identity theft (privacy).
• leadingzero - When and how to get paid.
• runnerkik - Protecting children who widely use social media in ways many parents don’t know how to protect. 

Thank you to everyone who offered a response!

Have any thoughts on ethical issues that weren’t covered? Add them in the comments and I will update the post.

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What is the biggest ethical issue we face in Social Media today?

A great question that was brought up in the SMC Los Angeles gathering tonight. I can think of one or two issues at hand.

What issue is chomping at your bit?

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Social Media Club No Longer Welcomed at MyRagan

Since I have received a few emails from some members already, let me just say I am disappointed that Mark Ragan has decided to take this action.  I have setup Social Media Club groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and many other social networking sites, so that members who use those services can come together to further the goals of the club.  Mark invited me to create a group on his “myspace” clone a few weeks ago, and even invited me to promote our Workshop through it.

Since becoming the largest group on MyRagan, Mark has apparently changed his mind, because the group (and my profile) was represented by the Social Media Club logo.  His post to the group (which he deleted after my response to this message) read:

We are recreating the Social Media Club tomorrow and re-naming it to read simply: Social Media Tools and Strategies.

The current logo for the club is giving the impression that we are somehow selling this space to an advertiser.  We are not. These groups are designed as non-commercial places where free discussion can flow without fear of being pitched. 

Your moderator will be Ragan editor Bill Sweetland.

Because we are changing the name of the club, you will all have to join it again. But, as you know, this only takes a few seconds. Look forward to seeing you back here soon.

Mark Ragan
CEO
MyRagan.com

There is more to say about this of course, but for now, just wanted to let you know that if you want to talk more about this, please join the main Social Media Club mailing list or of course, comment here.  I wish I could still have the message I sent in reply to him, but since it was deleted before the conversation could even begin, it is lost. I am sure I was not overly polite in it, but I was definitely speaking to the truth of the situation.  This is apparently not a MySpace clone at all - it now just seems like a social network established for the purpose of selling Ragan rather than serving the interests of the community as he originally told me.
Truth is though, it is his site and his rules so he can do what he wants with it and there is nothing to do about it except leave.  We will simply take our conversation elsewhere and I will move on so we don’t waste anymore energy on such things…

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Social Media Now: Blogger Code of Conduct is DOA

There are few things worse than media self-examination. It’s freighted with the kind of navel-gazing self importance that turns off all but the most egotistic insiders.

The mishugas surrounding Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to get a bloggers to adopt a code of conduct (his is modeled on the guidelines adopted by the BlogHer group) smacks a little bit of this kind of self-involvement.

I get civility. I practice it. Always will. But the kind of code O’Reilly’s is proposing is the kind of feel-good measure that will have no effect on the “problem,” to the extent that there is a problem at all.

As Duncan Riley wrote on the 901am blog: 

….those who think that a blogging code of conduct is the antidote to death threats and misogyny have about as much hope of success as I’ve got of space walking on Jupiter next year….

Reaction among the digerati has largely been strongly negative. People seem to feel there’s a mob mentality developing. Michael Arrington writes: 

…whenever someone, no matter how much I respect them, tries to tell me what I can and cannot do by defining “civility” around their own ideals, I tense up. It feels like a big angry mob is arming itself to the teeth and looking for targets, and I need to choose whether I’m with them or against them.

…The code of conduct and the mass of bloggers lining up behind it scares me a lot more than the hate comments and death threats
I’ve received in the past.

Robert Scoble had a similar reaction:

I do find disquieting the social pressure to get on board with this program. Tim O’Reilly is a guy who really can affect one’s career online (and off, too). I do have to admit that I feel some pressure just to get on board here and that makes me feel very uneasy.

Well, with this much opposition it hardly seems like the villagers are at the door with torches and pitchforks. In fact, it looks to me that the code is dead on arrival.

O’Reilly’s code would require bloggers to police themselves and the conversations that take place on their blogs for threatening language, libelous language, copyright infringement, and violations of privacy. But, except for the last matter, bloggers are already under a legal obligation to do these things or face potential civil or even criminal action. Contrary to popular belief, blog publishing is subject to the same legal standards of print publishing. There’s really no need for an extra code on this score.

Interestingly the only measure in O’Reilly’s code that would likely have an effect on blog incivility is the one that has met with the most opposition from the uber bloggers–banning anonymous comments.

I despise anonymous comments. Too often they function as a shield for precisely the kind of vitriol that creates problems, driving the level of discourse down to something that resembles a graffiti chain on a junior high school bathroom stall. Furthermore if the ethos of the social Internet is centered on personal responsibility, then taking responsibility for what you post–either on a blog or in comments–requires an openly declared identity. As a journalist, I was trained by both educators and editors, to allow source anonymity judiciously. It is an essential tool for reporting policy from the inside, for example, but it functions poorly in sport reporting when anonymous locker room sources pile on a coach or manager. Arrington and Scoble both refuse to ban anonymous comments. Fine. And certainly O’Reilly’s requirement that bloggers confirm the e-mail addresses of people posting comments is impractical. But anyone who accepts anonymous comments should be conscious of the potential for abuse.

 

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