Social Media Club – Detroit/Ann Arbor kicks off!

This past Tuesday, June 23, marks the inaugural meeting of Social Media Club – Detroit/Ann Arbor*. A bunch of us social media enthusiasts from all over southeast Michigan gathered at the Claddagh Irish Pub in Livonia to discuss our goals and the direction we’d like to see the club go.

What exactly is Social Media Club, you ask? Well, according to the national site,

Social Media Club brings together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaboraters. Essentially the people who create and consume media who have an interest in seeing the ‘media industry’ evolve for everyone’s benefit. 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. . .

SMC is now a handful of people managing the global organization on a part time basis, and actively working towards hiring full time staff as SMC files the 501c3 and push the organization further into the global space. Thanks to the efforts of our local leaders, we have grown to over 55 active chapters (40+ in the works) with 10’s of 1000’s of people gathering around the world.

Social Media Club has four missions, which are:

1. Expand Media Literacy
2. Share Lessons Learned Among Practitionerss
3. Encourage Adoption of Industry Standards
4. Promote Ethical Practices through Discussion and Actions

Chuck Smith of BlogTalkRadio fame did a great job of capturing snippets of the meeting on video over at his blog, and of course, Charlie of multiple-arena fame was there capturing snippets of everybody and everything for one of his many awesome videos.

Here are some of us talking about our biggest online pet peeve, and I’m (ironically) ranting on how I’ve come to loathe the term “social media”:

What’s your online pet peeve? from Charlie Wollborg on Vimeo.

Also featured in this video are @jesssoul, @chuckSmithMI, @julielyn, @ChrisCCL, @balanon, @sazbean, @rmercader, @davemurr and @bchesnutt. (Follow them, they’re cool.)

I honestly hate seeing myself on video but it’s unavoidable for me these days so I just suck it up and take one for the team. (Besides, I said “people are doing it online,” uh huh huh huh huh . . . )

You can learn more about Social Media Club – Detroit/Ann Arbor at the club’s wiki, including notes from the inaugural meeting, and follow @SMCDA2 on Twitter. There will be a Facebook page soon which will be linked here There is now an official SMCDA2 Facebook page, in addition to the original Facebook group.

Special props go to Dave Murray and Jessica Soulliere for stepping up and putting the club together, and to Tonja Deegan for scribing.

So what would you like to see the SMC – Detroit/Ann Arbor do? Any particular topics you’d like us to cover? And while we’re at it, what’s YOUR online pet peeve?

[Edit - 4:30 PM 6/26/09] Nikki Stephan (who couldn’t make it) commented that she’d like to see the club focus on where social media is going in the future, and that’s actually what I brought up at the meeting. I wasn’t going to embed another video of myself here but Chuck did get it on video so here ya go.  I guess great minds do think alike!

*Technically, I am not really “local” to Detroit, nor Ann Arbor, but all my friends live around there and I hope to be relocating back to Metro Detroit soon.

Little things like this make me love technology even more.

Yesterday my pal Robin of InnerMedia Coaching & Consulting and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor for one of the LA2M Marketing Meetings, whose speaker that day just happened to be one of my favorite people in all of Metro Detroit, the lovely, smart, and talented Ms. Shauna Nicholson, marketing manager for Biznet Internet Solutions in Wixom. She was leading a discussion on viral marketing.

Though I did RSVP on LA2M’s Facebook event page, I forgot to actually tell Shauna I was going to be there, and forgot to check to see if there was an official hashtag for the event. (I hadn’t been to one of these events before so I wasn’t sure.)

Robin and I were sitting at the far end of the room from Shauna. It was pretty packed, and there was a big table full of people in between us. I didn’t really want to get up just to ask her that, so what did I do?

I sent her a text message from across the noisy room:

is there a hashtag for this? #la2m?

I saw that she was just putting away her iPhone so I nudged Robin and said, “Watch this. . .”

Shauna suddenly looked at her phone, looked up, looked all the way down the long table of people and gave me an affirming nod.

I turned to Robin and said, “See? This is yet another reason I love technology!”