Social Media Club No Longer Welcomed at MyRagan
May 22, 2007
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…
What’s this Knowledge Market Thing?
May 4, 2007
One of the things I have not written about much, but I talk about till blue in the face and running out of air, is this idea of a Knowledge Market, which is at the heart of my vision for Social Media Club. It’s nothing overly odd, pretty much as you might imagine it based on common language usage – a place where people exchange knowledge – sometimes for free, sometime for money and always for reputation. We donate it to non-profits, share it with our colleagues and occasionally sell it in the form of books or consulting.
Thanks to the wonderful vote of confidence of a couple hundred paying members, we have begun to invest in building out the Club site on Drupal to make this vision a reality. While the vision is much larger than the first humble steps that will be visible in the coming weeks, the heart of the new site will clearly provide value to paying members. More importantly, I believe it will become a shining example of how things should be done within intentional communities of practice such as Social Media Club.
Very very soon, I will begin to talk about more details, and invite all members to join me in forming the tools we use to communicate and collaborate with one another… In the meantime, if you have some ideas of what we might need at the heart of the community, or you have some Drupal experience with version 5.1 or you know of some great Drupal based communities out there like http://www.gimme20.com/ which we might be able to learn from, drop me an email to chris [a-t] social media club dot com.
