SocialMediaClub.org says it launched for the purpose of elevating Social Media to a higher level of professionalism.
The organization intends to bring together different groups of social media practitioners such as bloggers, podcasters, publishers, journalists, students, artists, developers, marketers, and PR professionals.
Formed for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media, its a child of Chris Heuer, serial Internet entrepreneur and executive director of the not-for-profit BrainJams.org. who says "This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn."
This week the Club hosted its inaugural event in Silicon Valley to organize its first local chapter and to begin work on the hRelease, a Microformat standard for modernizing the traditional press release for a Web-centric world.
A New Media Release Google Group was established in June to discuss the future of the Press Release among PR professionals and other interested stakeholders.
Since the launch of its blog one month ago, SMC has received tremendous industry support says Heuer, who adds, "The path towards the transformation of Social Media Club from an idea and a blog into a real world community is paved with unconferences and blog posts tagged with socialmediaclub!"
The idea originated in the Fall of 2005 with the Web 2point1 BrainJam. This led Heuer and his fiancée Kristie Wells to create the non-profit BrainJams organization to promote unconferences and ad-hoc collaboration to a broader audience of less technical professionals. Over the last year, BrainJams has brought together like-minded people from different backgrounds for hosted conversations about the things that matter most to participants. As a result of thousands of conversations since, the team discovered that Social Media was their true passion and deserved to be the focus of their efforts.
Heuer continued, "We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist -- we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. By enabling the people who 'get it' to share it with others through programs like Adopt A Blogger, Social Tagging Project and dScribes, we believe that everyone touched by this industry will benefit from our efforts."