Using Social Media to track Hurricane Gustav

August 30, 2008

I love hearing interesting ways people are using Social Media, and the Ning site put up today to help report news on Hurricane Gustav is a brilliant use of the tools available. The site will aggregate content from a variety of sources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.

Kudos to Andy Carvin for starting it and for everyone participating/contributing to help educate folks in the affected areas as well as keeping us connected so we can mobilize when needed.

We are all praying Gustav dies before hitting land again, but if it should continue on - here’s hoping we are better prepared to take action and respond quickly.

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How To Launch An Amazing Social Network In 4 Days

August 18, 2008

MetzLaunch
[I posted this article on my blog yesterday, but thought it might help a few SMC members if it were reposted.]

Last week, I strategized and launched a pretty large social network in four days, with the help of a really amazing team. In some days, I have done jobs like this before, in that I’ve launched a hyper-local social network last year in a couple of hours, but in many ways, I entered uncharted waters this week with this particular implementation.

To learn 13 of the things that you’ll need to do as a social web strategist, in order to get a huge, robust social network up in a ridiculously short time period, just follow this link. Damn the torpedoes!

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Finally! WordPress Reveals Favorite Plugins

August 16, 2008

Per Matt’s request, I held this under embargo until he started his address - may need to update wiht more facts once he explains the whole story

One of the things that struck me when I started using WordPress was that the Plugin and Theme universe was extremely vast. So vast, that I could never tell very easily which Plugin I should use, especially when there are 7 flavors of “recent comments”. So at the first WordCamp (or sometime around there) I was talking with Matt Mullenweg about this need.

I was thinking this might be a neat side business as a site to run, but Matt told me about this idea that he just announced as a reality during the “State of the Word” today - where WordPress would be actually looking at the statistics of which plugins people are actually using, rather than what people explicitly rate. This is a unique side benefit of the auto-update feature of the latest version of WordPress.

This new reality opens a new path to easier WordPress configuration. More importantly, it is a path to learning our collective best practices, doing what Web 2.0 and Social Media is best at, making things visible that previously were not.

While I anticipate some people in a privacy uproar over this, I don’t really see a problem with the fact that they have been collecting these statistics. The reason is very simple. I know Matt personally. I know Tony personally. I trust them to do the right thing. I trust they thought of this issue. In fact, when Matt told me about this announcement a short while ago, we both laughed nervously and expressed that, “oh shit, what are people gonna say when they find this out” look to each other.

This is just so cool, I am so happy to finally be able to see what other WordPress users are doing with their plugins. In fact, on the way here to WordCamp, I twittered a question for the people in attendance, asking which are the essential plugins? The answers I got are below. The real answers will soon be seen through WordPress’ new feature - I can’t wait to play with it…

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Oops! The Missing 42nd Interim Board Member

July 9, 2008

Looks like we (I) made a mistake.  I think I was looking for the number of interim board members to be 42 subconsciously, even though we only had 41 as Lloyd Davis pointed out in the comments of our interim board announcement today.  If you aren’t into sci-fi, you probably don’t know that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe and everything, but I digress…

The bottom line is that we accidentally listed Doug Pollei twice and I didn’t catch it when writing the final post and list of links.  So this brings up the question of how to deal with it and how to live our values transparently (which is another way of saying honestly IMHO).  As I have been explaining for some time, its usually the response that is more important then the mistake or the message.  So rather than adding in someone else to make it look like a typographical error instead of a stoopid human one, we would like to make some lemonade from these lemons.  I would also like to point out that the conversation here in the comments works - Lloyd cared enough to actually count through the number of members, pointed out the mistake and we corrected it… That is one of the ways that social media can be more powerful then broadcast media.

This afternoon in thinking about what we might do, we came up with what I think is a better idea for how to resolve this mistake - instead of just appointing someone from the vast array of people I had to leave out, we are now searching for the missing 42nd interim board member (I do love the Doug Adams reference as you may have guessed from our win a free professional SMC membership contest announced on Twitter).  If you or someone you know would like to volunteer and join the interim board with us, please reply in the comments after reading and agreeing to the general terms below.

  1. All submissions must be for/from real people, no trolls allowed
  2. You can submit yourself or suggest someone else
  3. You have to want to do it and be willing to volunteer several hours per month to communications and other activities to further the objectives announced in the post
  4. All people who are listed for consideration will be vetted via brief phone call (dont leave your #, we will contact you for it via email)
  5. Everyone will be considered who submits their name before midnight PST on Saturday July 12 2008 but not anyone after that time
  6. From Monday July 14th at 12:01am PST to Wednesday July 16th at midnight PST, all valid submissions for consideration will be presented for voting on this Web site.  The choice of the missing 42nd board member will be decided upon by open vote here
  7. All submissions and the final winner will be subject to approval by existing interim board

So, despite it taking some more energy to coordinate, we want to do this openly and we want to involve more of our members. I think this is the best route and look forward to seeing who else is interested in helping us move this organization forward.

Also today several people have raised some questions and concerns about the interim board which I will be answering later tonight with a more in depth post…

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Filed Under About SMC, The SMC Organization · 55 Comments  

Social Media Club Forms Interim Board To Chart Strategic Direction and Advance Its Goals

July 9, 2008

Charting a new direction!The Social Media Club (SMC), a new media and advocacy organization focused on social media, today announced that 42 well-regarded industry leaders have volunteered to form an interim Board of Directors.

The new interim board has been charted to address several key organizational and strategic deliverables, including development of membership goals, acceleration of local chapter development, increase in adoption of industry standards and implementation of a new legal structure to enhance future growth.

New interim Board Member and Adjunct Professor of Social Media at University of Miami Alex de Carvalho said “Social Media Club is an important industry organization that has been working to establish social media standards and ethics. The voluntary participation of such noted industry leaders to further its mission is a clear indication of the Social Media Club’s value and contributions. I look forward to collaborating with the new interim board to progress the Social Media Club from being a ‘big idea’ to serving the community as a prominent agent of change.”

According to Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Partner at The Conversation Group, “The Social Media Club is honored to have so many accomplished and well-regarded industry evangelists come forward to lead the organization. While the interim board will focus on charting the organization’s future direction, our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.”

Co-Founder and Social Media Club President Kristie Wells added, “We are grateful to have received so much support from around the world over the past two years. With nearly 200 paying members and over 500 open members - we are deeply appreciative of the volunteer efforts to make the Social Media Club a success. With leading corporate members, such as Business Wire and SHIFT Communications, as well as dedicated individual professionals, the Social Media Club will continue to gain momentum and serve the greater needs of the industry while sharing our lessons learned along the way.”

The board will also focus on increasing its research efforts and strengthening relationships with other organizations such as the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) and the International Association for Business Communicators (IABC). The interim board’s work will be completed once the club reorganizes as a new entity, and holds an election amongst its members for a formal Board of Directors.

The newly named/appointed members of the interim board are leading social media analysts, bloggers and business leaders, and are as follows:

About the Social Media Club

The Social Media Club centers on the sharing of best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy with a focus on the emerging discipline of Social Media. The Social Media Club brings together journalists, publishers, communication professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaborators who create and consume media and have an interest in seeing the industry improve and evolve. The Social Media Club provides a forum for diverse groups and individuals to discover, connect, share and learn about social media and to play a role in its future evolution.

To find out more about the opportunities in social media and connect with other practitioners, visit: http://www.socialmediaclub.org

* Photo by Fabrizio Sciami, Creative Commons  Attribution-Share Alike License

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Trending towards more social organizations?

June 10, 2008

Chris wrote an interesting piece today that stems from some of his work being done on ‘The Social Media Playbook’ (out in 2008 or 2009 or 2010…have no idea…don’t ask…I know nothing) called Towards a More Social Organization.  It is a topic close to my heart. It is focusing the point of Web 2.0/Social Media back on the people, not the processes or the technology.

In the article, Chris suggests the need for a Chief Social Officer - someone who would work closely with a CMO/CEO. Someone who believes:

…embracing social media is embracing change management; changing the way teams collaborate; improving our relationships with customers; affecting our interaction with partners; overseeing customer support; empowering sales people to be purchase support; altering our product innovation and creation processes; and ultimately, bringing us out of the industrial age, beyond the information age and into a new age of enlightenment. It requires us to break down, once and for all, the silo walls that separate groups, the moats that have created fiefdoms of power and the interpersonal bullshit that prevents us from seeing that we all want what’s best, even if we have different ideas of how to do it.

What do you think?  Is this a new role that needs to be filled?  Please leave your comments on Chris’ blog.

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Join our Friend Feed Room, kill a mailing list!

May 24, 2008

Friend FeedOK, I finally succumbed to the hype and got past the shiny object syndrome to see the real potential of Friend Feed when they added the new rooms feature.  I have been telling everyone I know for the past 2 years that groups done simply and done right are the real killer app - and now this addition just might kill Twitter (though they are doing a pretty good job themselves).

Since I started using it for real as part of my continuous parallel attention,  which has been limited by deadlines and travel this week, I finally got it.  Not only are the comments and thumbs up (like) features cool, but ‘get a room’ has taken on a whole new meaning.

If blogs replace email as a way for communications and collaboration, Friend Feed Rooms replace the mailing list.  In that Mike McGrath, Janet Fouts and I were talking about building up the SMC mailing list finally, I realized we would just make a Friend Feed Room instead.  So come join me there and lets start really sharing with one another…

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Social Media Club Phoenix

November 10, 2007

December meeting

Begins: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 at 6:30 PM

Ends: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 at 8:00 PM

Entry fee: Free

Location:

Jobing.com, 2nd floor

22nd St. south of Camelback Road

Phoenix, AZ 85016

USA

Link: Social Media Club Phoenix

Monthly meeting of the Phoenix Social Media Club.
Video tools for social media will be the topic, although almost anything might be discussed.

Tags: social media, Phoenix, Web 2.0, user-generated content.

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SMC Happy Hour: Web 2.0 Wrapup from The Palace Hotel

October 19, 2007

I was very fortunate to be hanging out in the lobby of The Palace Hotel checking in with a few friends from Web 2.0 Summit on Friday Afternoon - check out our chat with Joseph Smarr, Salim Ismail, Richard MacManus and Jason Hoffman - very insightful stuff… The victory of open source platforms, the open social graph/bill of rights, the latest from Yahoo! Brickhouse, the importance of the iPhone SDK and other observations from Web 2.0…

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Get your Gnomedex Tickets Now!

July 13, 2007

Saw a Tweet the other day from Chris Pirillo that there were still a few tix left for this years Gnomedex from August 9-11 in Seattle, WA, which is shocking for me since it is the best conference out there for Bloggers, Podcasters and Social Media professionals. From the looks of this year’s speaker and attendee list, you won’t be disappointed - in fact you would be remiss in not heading over and registering right now.

Last year it sold out early, but it seems ticket sales have been a little slower this year - I think this is primarily because of the huge surge in other wannabe conferences, the rise in unconferences, the tough workload everyone is under and the later summer date. Eventhough things are tight here after paying for the wedding, this is a must attend event for me, so I bit the bullet (hope my new wife won’t mind ;)

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Why did Ragan Really Delete the SMC Group?

May 24, 2007

This morning someone forwarded me the latest press release from Ragan Communications promoting the MyRagan site and yesterday someone forwarded me an email from Ragan promoting their next social media conference. In both cases, Ragan is claiming to be the first. The first social network for PR Professionals, and the first social media conference for PR Professionals. Why isn’t anyone else calling him out for these plain and simple untruths that are clearly indicative of his bravado and boastfulness. Why isn’t anyone pointing out to them that being a MySpace clone is really not all that great a claim? Why are they touting Strumpette’s effuse praise…. in a press release?

Could the real reason that they deleted the Social Media Club group on My Ragan be because they were about to start heavily promoting the site and selling their educational events and did not want to have the largest group on the site be from someone they view as a competitor? Funny thing Mark, you said, and your own Blogger Dave Murray quoted you on this, that you would help me promote the club and our workshop through your site. Mark Ragan said at that time, referring to me and Social Media Club, “I don’t fear you”. How should people interpret your words and actions Mark?

For others who think this is a ‘dustup’ between myself and Mark, you are very mistaken - this is a matter of someone using their power to control the conversation, now employing spin meisters to pull the wool over people’s eyes. This is a matter of transparency, truthiness and trust that is much more important than me or you or even him. This is a question of how we want the world to be, and how we want corporations to communicate with the world - is it going to really be about conversation, or is it going to be about the rouse of conversation as a front for the same old, same old BS.

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Filed Under About SMC, Ethics, Events · 11 Comments  

The Evolution of Social Media Club

May 23, 2007

It is with great sorrow that I write this post today. I have been searching for a business partner to help me realize some of my visions for many, many years, and in Howard Greenstein I thought I had found “the one”. He is a bright guy that has been through this before and has many of the skills that are really well suited for this type of work, but he wasn’t happy, so I must respect that.

As Howard so eloquently expressed in his post, the reality of running a community organization from day to day is much different than the idealism that inspired it. The vision of improving the world around us by bringing people together to share their understanding of the emerging Social Media market is vastly different than trying to manage a global network of local groups and online activities without sufficient resources.

The main reason for not announcing this sooner is that I needed time to reflect on the situation and on how my path might change as a result of this news - on what this really means for me, personally and professionally. When I met Howard, I was looking for a CEO to take the reigns and build the organization - to operationalize the vision and allow me to be the visionary, evangelist and thinker - to let me focus on my strengths and mitigate my weaknesses. As anyone who has personally met me will tell you, I am a fairly self-aware sort of guy, and I am very clearly aware that managing an organization and all the little details is not one of my natural strengths. Though I have done it before and could do it again, I just don’t want to –I want to be happy doing what makes my heart sing, and I know what that is and what it doesn’t.

While Howard’s observations are indeed true, there is of course more to this - a sort of more which Howard politely avoids bringing to light, but which radical transparency compels me to note. One of the ideas I have been evangelizing around the knowledge economy for the past several years is that “the number one factor of creating value in the knowledge economy is the ability of smart people to collaborate effectively.” We just never hit our stride, with different work styles, different ideas of success and the geographic challenges Howard mentioned contributing to the difficulties we faced.

Personally, I have gone from the high’s of the dream and all its possibilities to the reality of not enough resources, mounting personal debt and the struggles of being overwhelmed each day with too much to do. In short, I am tired and ready to find another way forward, to take this in stride and make a course correction that will let us accomplish the goals of improving media literacy and hosting conversations amongst social media professionals and those seeking to learn.

Unfortunately, I too must step down, or more aptly, I need to step back so that I might be able to make a living, pay for some of my wedding and pay for my monthly living expenses. I have focused too much on trying to do things for the community and not taken care of myself properly. I did this with my first startup, only I gave employees salaries when I could not afford to take one, learning the hard way how wrong this was. The thing is, that if we had money to pay people, I probably would have made that same mistake again (especially to get you involved Dave).

So what does this mean for Social Media Club? In the short term, nothing - monthly meetings will continue, we will continue to blog to the sites, we will complete development of our new social network through drupal and I am still responsible for shepherding the vision forward. All this really means is that I can not spend all my waking moments thinking about how to build the club and can no longer afford to hold out hope that I will soon be getting a salary from Social Media Club. Instead, I need to invest my attention in promoting myself as a Social Media consultant, customer advocate and social software architect/analyst – as a big thinker, new media marketing maven. I need more consulting gigs or I need to find the right job for my unique talents - both of which I am immediately moving towards and will write more about shortly. Sucess here will let me continue to cultivate the club as a part time endeavour.

We will continue pressing onward with the Social Media Workshop Series - this is a great event we have designed, and we will be working on doing several more cities in the fall such as Austin, Boston and New York.

I will soon be announcing more details (and seeking more input) on our new community site, to be run on Drupal, which will provide real value to the membership and value for the membership dollars already received.

I am now investigating how Social Media Club might be reorganized as a 501(c)6, a non-profit designation for trade associations which will make Social Media Club a member owned organization, or put another way, a sort of co-op. This was a large part of my original vision for the club, which I confided in private with many who can verify this idea. I think members of the club should benefit from the value we co-create with one another. I alluded to this in part in my comment on the Social Media Now “when users attack” post.

In closing, while this is very difficult in the short term, Social Media Club is not going away, we just need to find a new path forward together - and I will need your help to do so. I still have very high hopes that Social Media Club will accomplish its mission and fully serve the community in the way I had intended, but to continue to try to do things in the same manner as I have, would surely be proof that doing the same thing and expecting different results is the epitome of ‘being crazy’.

If you are a co-founder, I really need your help more than your dollars. If you are a local leader and not yet a paying member, please consider doing so in order to help move the organization forward – it will be a requirement of the new organizational structure as it takes shape, so we should all have some ’skin in the game’. Stay tuned for more to come later this week, but more importantly, join the conversation about what we can do together as a community on the Social Media Club mailing list…

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Filed Under About SMC, Education, The SMC Organization · 15 Comments  

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…

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Filed Under Ethics · 20 Comments  

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

April 24, 2007

Saw a Tweet from Jeremiah Owyang giving a nod to his boss John Furrier for standing up for his team, and then saw Robert Scoble’s post at the heart of it all, telling people he was going to hang out in the hallway at Microsoft’s Mix 07 Conference since he did not have a conference pass. Apparently, Alfred Thompson thinks that conferences like Mix 07 should only be attended by and reported on, by “people inside the trenches”, “whose business it is to not only understand but use this technology?” He sees little value to the media, and thinks Robert “is a writer for the popular press no real different from some reporter from Wired magazine.” (he also thinks Robert is a nice guy, so don’t go jumping on him for expressing his opinion)

You can think whatever you want about Robert, even insist that he has no real influence in the mainstream portions of society and that he is only important within the Blogosphere’s echo chamber, but that is missing the real point. You can’t marginalize anyone based on the role they are serving in society, especially when that someone has proven themselves to be a good person, worthy and deserving of the trust placed in them by others to shape their opinions of the world. Einstein was famously a patent clerk. Hundreds of important contributors to the advancement of society have held mundane, or even ‘dirty’ jobs.

This is not about Robert and Alfred though, this is about the need to respect other people and not be dismissive of the potential value they can contribute out of hand, for the title they hold or role they serve. For too long we have easily dismissed ‘the media’, ‘the marketing people’, ‘the geeks’ and, as Mary Hodder talked about on her panel at Podcast Hotel the other day, ‘the others’ because they are not like us.

Now, from reading the conversation (via the comments), it seems that Alfred is a pretty decent guy, honest and genuine - but when I read statements such as “Don’t you really want to hear from someone like you?”, it makes me cringe. This is, of course, ok because we like hanging out with people like us, they are our friends, our tribes and our families generally, but we should really find a better way to include more diverse perspectives within the context of conferences such as Mix, Web 2.0 and others. To be clear, I don’t feel the same way about conferences on the latest advances in neuroscience, or white-hat hacking or other very focused professional topics. This is not to say that programming is not a professional topic, it is, but the profession of programming includes many levels of skills and areas of expertise that are important for everyone’s success. (DBA, SYSADMIN, CODE, ARCHITECT, UI, QA and ACTIVE USER to name a few)

Over the past several years, one of the things I have been talking to people about is how much economic value (and hard cash) has been wasted as a result of the marketing people and the technical people not getting along. Trillions of dollars have probably been lost as a result of the fact that these two roles are filled by different types of people - people who are not like each other in many ways (not all the time, I know plenty of people who successfully translate between the two groups or who serve both roles). As I have constantly stated, in the knowledge economy the most important aspect of creating value is the ability of smart people to collaborate with one another. The value of cultural diversity is widely known and lauded, but many people often insist on only hearing and participating in monocultural discussions.

BTW - This is not to say that there can be some really silly things that come from people who don’t understand what we are talking about, which is what I believe Alfred is trying to protect against - along with preventing media from misreporting the story. Indeed, we should create contexts in which experts can gather and explore their expertise, going deeper and advancing their industry/market - this is in fact, a part of our vision with Social Media Club as well. The real issue though is that we should work to create contexts for all of these types of conversations to take place and create good signals about them (via tags and syndicated distribution) so that the right sort of people, with similar expectations participate.
From my perspective, Alfred’s point about Blogs (and direct reporting from ‘experts in the trenches’) replacing the need for mainstream media, actually supports the inclusion of people like Robert and other’s who are ‘not like him’ (Alfred). By this I mean to say, that Blogging is transforming the very nature in which we interact with news and knowledge and each other. It is no longer the one way communications of a static newspaper article, but it is a conversation, with ebb and flow, moving the participants to a deeper understanding through the back and forth exchange and thereby correcting mistakes in early reporting and resolving misinterpretations for the benefit of all.
What is it going to take to open up our discussions and our perspectives, to include more divergent observations, insights and points of view?

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Filed Under Citizen Journalism · Leave a Comment  

CommonCraft Paperwork: RSS in Plain English

April 23, 2007

Great video from Lee and Sachi LeFever working to craft a better explanation of RSS for everyday folks. Good idea, and something we want to see more people trying to do - coming up with their own stories explaining the real value they get from their tools and how they use them. It is in their new ‘paperwork’ format and the first in what I imagine will be many such episodes, Video: RSS in Plain English.

The important thing to note here is that just because it has been done, doesn’t mean you can’t improve on it by trying your own creative explanation, but do give them some good feedback and love over on their blog. I think the one thing missing really was a good podsafe music background. I kept getting a Mr Bill vibe, was a little worried for the little guy sitting at this computer really… I really miss those great clay figure shows - perhaps Lee was channeling a bit…

I tried to embed the video here, but it is not cooperating with WordPress, so check it out over on their site… Video: RSS in Plain English.

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Filed Under Education · 2 Comments  

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