Preserving our Fondest Memories Digitally - SMC San Francisco Thursday Sep 20

Join us this Thursday September 20, 2007 in San Francisco at Adobe’s offices beginning at 630pm for a fascinating look at how we are preserving our memories and sharing them with our loved ones (please register here). Social Media, emerging technologies and storytelling are changing the way we connect and stay connected with our families and friends - but what about those folks who don’t know Web 2.0, or those that are not digital natives. How can they preserve their memories and share their favorite stories? This is more than just another look at Flickr and YouTube.

We are going to take a look at a great service I first heard about from Social Media Club Phoenix called iMemories, when I met Linda VandeVrede, their PR Director. Joining us for this discussion will be Mark Rukavina, their CEO wo will talk about some of his insights from helping the boomer generation leverage Social Media technologies. He will also address some of the difficulties of dealing with non-digital media and the solutions they have developed for digitizing them and storing them in higher quality.

Additionally, I am very excited to have our long time friend and very early supporter Jen Myronuk joining us to talk about the importance of digital storytelling and her experience interviewing important senior community leaders before the pass away. Jen is the founder of Storyfield and brings a unique perspective to this subject that is very complementary to Mark’s.

We will kick off the evening with a short introduction on the topic and share some personal experiences about how we are each preserving our memories today. Mark and Jen will each then give separate presentations, discussing the social and technical issues involved. We will then dive into a round table discussion of the challenges we each face in preserving our own memories - from conversion, to storage, to sharing and even educating our families about how to use the tools.

Many thanks to Adobe for hosting us and sponsoring this great event with food and drinks. We will have informal networking from 630-7pm, kicking off the discussion and presentations promptly at 7pm and going through 830pm. Please register here so we have an accurate head count for food!

Second Life: How Virtual Worlds Create Real World Value (mtg in SF)

At last month’s Podcast Hotel, I finally had a chance to catch up with good friends Ted Tagami and Kathleen Craig, who have been moving at warp speed working for Millions of Us producing some amazing work inside Second Life for some very, very big brands. After delving into the practical business value and the utopian ideals of virtual worlds which many of us have been discussing for over a decade, I invited him to speak at this month’s San Francisco Social Media Club meeting to share what they have learned so far from their real world experiences.

This is going to be the sort of meeting you don’t want to miss. So please join us On Thursday May 24 from 6-830pm at Adobe’s SOMA HQ for a presentation and discussion on Second Life and the potential for virtual worlds to deliver real world business value. Ted Tagami will lead the presentation which will be followed by a round table discussion and a live Exploration of Second Life. Ted will be joined by his Millions of Us colleagues - Mat Small, Director of PR, and Kathleen Craig, Producer. During Ted’s presentation, we will hear different case studies of how brands have been able to successfully enter Second Life.

As always, the round table format is meant to be interactive, where everyone has a chance to ask questions, share their personal experiences and add their perspective to the conversation.  If the group is fairly large, we will break into smaller groups for more intimate discussions, but since we will be “in world” for most of the presentation, are striving to keep the group together.
Special Thanks to Adobe and Crimson Consulting for sponsoring the San Francisco meeting. We are looking forward to seeing you on Thursday. Please do register here so we can let Adobe know who is coming and prepare the room accordingly.

Social Media Workshops

Today, Social Media Club will announce “Starting the Conversation,” our first series of day-long business workshops, at SocialMediaWorkshop.com. The first will be June 11 at SAP headquarters in Palo Alto. Then we move to New York City on June 19th; Boston, June 21 and Austin June 26.
Consultant-writer Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, has agreed to be host-moderator for the entire series. Shel has been a frequent and well-received keynote speaker on social media issues to business audiences in Europe and North America.

In each city, guest instructors prominent in social media will join us. They will be announced as we get closer to each event. These workshops are designed for mid and upper level professionals who are interested in not just getting the big picture of how social media is fundamentally changing business, it is for people who want to understand real and actionable tactics for bringing social media media programs into their work environment, without fear and based on programs that will show co-workers the value of social media. (More information on the agenda page.)
Tickets are on sale now, with an early-bird discount for those who purchase seats soon. Also available is a package where attendees can purchase membership to Social Media Club and obtain the member discount of 10% off the advertised price. (Existing Social Media Club Professional, Small Business and Corporate members can also benefit from discount code SMCMEMBER). We hope to see you there.
Technorati Tags: socialmediaworkshop, socialmediaclub, shelisrael, blogging, education

Social Media Club San Francisco Tonight - 20FEB2007

If you were not aware of our meeting tonight here in San Francisco and are not busy somewhere else, we hope you can join us for a very interesting round table / workshop. We are very pleased to have our friends Tom Abate and Tom Foremski leading a discussion about what makes a good interview, and more broadly how to be better journalists. Tom Abate has written up a good post called “How to make friends and interview people” which you can read before coming down to CNet HQ tonight at 6pm. Please register here if you are coming…

My inspiration behind this topic was the realization that I often spend too much effort trying to get out my own thoughts and ideas, rather than giving my full undivided attention to the person I am interviewing. While that may just be symptomatic of the fact I am interviewing my peers, I guess I should have gone for the Major in Communications while at American University instead of the Minor. Ultimately, my hope is that we can all learn a thing or two about the process of interviewing someone and are able to improve the quality of of our blogs and podcasts. (if you want to bring a podcast rig, or video camera for your interviews, please do so!)

6:00pm - Registration opens, beers are cold
6:30pm - Kickoff
6:35pm - Introductions, share a new resource, tool or site you are now using
6:50 (or so) - Tom and Tom will be speaking for about 30 minutes, after which we will have a short break
7:30pm - Workshop - I propose that we break into pairs to do practice interviews for 5 minutes each focused on using some of the techniques and tips you learned, questions to be discussed
7:50pm - Reconvene as a group to discuss what worked, what didn’t work and what you learned
8:15pm - Wrap up

We will have beers and waters on hand to quench your thirst and a few light snacks while you soak in the good conversation.

We are getting busier and busier helping people all over the country and the world, which means we could really use some more help locally in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to assist things in running more smoothly here. If you are interested in helping organize future San Francisco gatherings, please let us know and/or just edit our San Francisco Wiki page, which is one of the things that needs help in getting updated at the moment…

BTW - the tag for the event is smc:interviewing

PLEASE READ: Details for San Francisco January 16th meeting

We are very excited for our Social Media Club Round Table in San Francisco - which became so popular, we not only had to close registrations, but we have had to change the format for the event to accommodate the group - we also need your help in finding a sponsor to cover the costs, so read more below.

As a result of your enthusiasm, we have been inspired to launch a new series of events we will be hosting regularly around the world called the Social Media Café.

http://www.socialmediacafe.com/ will be launching soon

Additionally, we are very pleased to announce that we have the support of Thomas Hurley, a master at facilitating The World Café format, which we have used successfully in the past. If you are not familiar with The World Café format, it is in essence a series of small group conversations you will have with other participants focused on key questions of interest to the group. This is a great way to tap into the collective intelligence of the room, by enabling the insights and experiences to bubble up from the small groups to be shared with the larger group.

You can find out more about The World Café @ http://www.theworldcafe.org/

VERY VERY IMPORTANT

• I had originally intended to purchase beverages and snacks myself for this event, but with the event size being what it is, could really use a sponsor/patron. Since it is last minute, we just want to cover costs. If anyone is interested, please contact me at 408.834.0884 or leave a comment in this post.
• If you can not make it to the event, please let us know so we can open up your spot to someone else. There are over 160 people attending/watching on Upcoming!
• If you know of someone else who wants to come, please have them contact us to be put on the waiting list.
• We would very much like to start this conversation before we get together and keep it going afterwards. To that end, if you have something that has been keeping you up at night you want to talk about regarding what you hope to see happen with Social Media in 2007, or what you want to prevent from happening, write it up and tag it with ‘SMCafe1′. We are also very interested in talking with you about what you want to see from us, as a community of Social Media Practitioners, so any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

There is a lot more to talk about, but we can save that for next week. In the meantime, have a great weekend! We are looking forward to seeing you on TUE night.

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