The Social Media Club

I’ve volunteered to help organize the Silicon Valley chapter of the Social Media Club. The SMC was founded for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. 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.

There are 17 chapters so far, with more in the planning stages. My hope is that the Silicon Valley chapter can attract those involved in social media whether they are from journalism, pr, marketing, product development, and engineering. With major enterprise players like BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Sun adding social features to their offerings, I expect the SV chapter will have a pronounced Enterprise 2.0 flavor. If you consider all of the local startups in the social media space I think we can build a diverse chapter in short order.

I’m looking forward to building on the conversation that the founder, Chris Heuer, started.

Something New

I’ve joined forces with an old colleague, Tony Bove, to start an agency called Tacit Partners. We’ve taken the name from a thread of conversation on Tacit Knowledge. That’s the information in an organization that’s not easily shared. It’s buried in knowledge that individuals have, but find difficult to share. Our job is to use our methodology to extract, compose, and deliver that communication to the right people at the right time.

Much of our thinking is influenced by the current crop of lightweight tools that are collectively known as Enterprise 2.0. Since much of that software is oriented towards sharing content it plays a part in our thinking around feeds, structured tagging, filtering, and presentation. Our solution guide outlines platforms that can augment the marketer’s communication channels.

Still, GIGO is a valid rule, so our solutions are not just technical ones. It’s an editorial, process and people solution as well. There’s no substitute for elbow grease and persistence when trying to meet deadlines with timely and relevant information.

We’ve hung out our shingle and are launching our company. Stay tuned.

Social Cisco

The New York Times reported that Cisco purchased the remaining assets of social networking pioneer Tribe.net. That much they got right. Further down they say

“Marc Canter, a former Tribe.net consultant who has created his own social networking firm, People Aggregator, was an early supporter of OpenID. “Humans are migratory beasts, and we do not want to re-enter our data every time we join a new site,” he said. “Users own their data and should be able to move it around freely.”

That’s been Marc’s mantra for years. I’m glad he’s finally being heard. On the other hand, they garbled PeopleAggregator and called it the name of his company. You’d think they’d get their facts straight. They’re the professionals, after all.