Social Media Club Boston: if you get it, share it

Last night I attended the kick off meeting of the Boston gang (what do I call it? Branch? Chapter?) of the Social Media Club. Funny that online social media people need to occasionally meet offline to make sure we're all real. Check out the proof here.

Todd Van Hoosear and the team at Topaz Partners organized the event and got something like 120 people in the room. Well done guys.

This was a stellar group. Wow. How cool to meet people in the real that I had read on their blogs many times and traded emails with.

I finally met Todd Defren, Principal at Shift Communications who helped pioneer the Social Media Press Release format which I am a big fan of. I had interviewed Todd for my book, and we've traded a bunch of emails.

Bryan Person is a consultant (he does a lot of work with Monster) and is someone who really gets stuff like podcasting and video. I'm hoping Bryan will tell me more about what Monster is up to with social media so I can put it into my book.

Brian Del Vecchio had an interesting insight during the breakout sessions which I quite liked. He said that the media used to be produced only by people who owned the capital to create media (newspaper printing presses) & TV stations for example). Now the capital to publish is virtually zero. Anyone can undermine big media now because it is so easy to do. Blog on.

Scott Monty is an expert in B2B social media, an emerging niche of social media that I like a lot. Scott gets it and works with larger companies to help them get it too.

John Wall from The M Show is a great resource if you need to know the basics of podcasting. He helped me as I was writing the podcasting section of my book.

The Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. The Club has come together through the tireless efforts of Chris Heuer, the club's co-founder, and many others. In his opening remarks Chris defined Social Media as the nexus point around which all of the different people (podcasters, bloggers, PR people, etc.) who are communicating online come together.

The Club is the forum where people learning from one another. In his opening remarks, Chris said, "We're all figuring out this stuff together. Nobody has all the answers. The club learns from each other and we share knowledge and help people succeed."

Some ideas of the Social Media Club include: Promotion of media literacy both the understanding of the media and produce media (such as blogs), media ethics, media standards, and sharing best practices (Club motto: "if you get it, share it").

Comments

[Chris Heuer]

Nice to meet you last night David - looking forward to reading your new book...

[John Wall]

Thanks for the link!

[Todd Van Hoosear]

David, thanks for all the links to other folks--it's great to see the network coalescing so quickly after the event (despite the fact that it took me till today to get my act together and post about it myself).

It *is* ironic, but still great, that social media people want to meet F2F. Oh, BTW, we added even more Flickr photos with the smcboston tag--got quite a few now.

So glad you could make it out to the event. Love to hear your thoughts on future events and topics--keep following the smcboston.org blog, wiki, forums (soon to be populated), etc.

Thanks again!

- Todd

[Andrew J. Hewett]

Hey, I kept looking until I found it. Everything you said you needed is at www.chewednews.com

Andrew