As I tweeted a few days ago, I reckon there now exists a possibility to amalgamate many of the activities the various disparate groups of social media evangelists in Adelaide are undertaking.

This could potentially save time, effort and the stress levels of the organisers of those various events.

Here’s my thoughts so far – please add to the discussion!
[Précis below]

We have the newly-formed #CommsAdelaide twitter group of various business communicators (led by @PPRAdelaide’s angelic Dena Vassallo); we also have the young and lovely @monnie (Monique Klein)’s BarCamp group, plus the gorgeous @charlierobinson and her motley bunch of ne’er do wells (just kidding, friends!)

Now, some history…

The indefatigable and wise, witty and elegantly beautiful Shai Coggins (@shaicoggins) tried forming a regular group of dinners 18 months ago, but I guess it was too early for Adelaide to be a sustainable project; although Charlie certainly kept the flag flying with her friends! [grin]

So to today and my thoughts…

A couple of years ago I was asked by the lovely Kristie Wells if I wanted to set up a Social Media Club chapter here in Adelaide. We even set up a Facebook profile. My head and life just didn’t have enough room to add in getting a new group off the ground, so I let it just sit there.

But perhaps the time is right to resurrect it and bring a more structured approach to how we talk about social media and social networking, and how share our views and ideas here in Adelaide.

I am certainly not suggesting that we need disband all of the initiatives already set up; I am suggesting that they can all be incorporated under the ‘umbrella’ of a Social Media Club chapter in Adelaide, enabling the various organisers to call on others in the club to help get the events ‘over the line’ and make them even more successful.

Now, the issue of funding and membership fees needs discussing. As the SMC say on their website:

Annual Membership Level	Standard (note: US$)
Open Non-Profit or Student Professional Small Business (3 members) Media (5 Members) Corporate (10 Members)	$0.00 $25.00 $100.00 $250.00 $1,000.00 $2,499.00

Here’s what they say about the fee structure and the various membership level benefits:

What specific things do I get for the different membership levels?

As with many of the other aspects of organizing Social Media Club, we are still determining some of these issues and hope to make some final decisions with the contributions of our paid members. The initial promises we can make somewhat confidently include the following benefits:

Open Membership ($0 cost)

• Members and member companies will be able to join our email lists and our social network so that they can connect with others in Social Media Club who have similar interests or needs.
• Access to special information, how to’s, and the shared knowledge of the information created at all the chapter meetings and events we organize. As with most free services, we expect that certain areas of the site will have advertising which will not be a part of paying member’s experience. The details are still to be determined, but we share your perspective in regards to making this truly fair and reasonable as opposed to over the top and intrusive.
• As a member, you also have the opportunity to put a Social Media Club member badge on your Web site or blog that links through to your member profile and a membership affiliate program that provides you with a 3% new member referral commission. There will be unique recognition and ongoing contests around those who recruit the most new members.

Student / Non-Profit Members ($25 yearly)

• In addition to the benefits above, those at this membership level will receive a membership kit with stickers and other schwag (all of which is still being finalized)..
• All members at this level and above will receive discounts to the various events that are organized by Social Media Club or its partner organizations. Admission to Social Media Club Local Conversations is expected to be free, however there may be occasional requests for contributions for refreshments and other costs of organizing the events which we hope to have offset through sponsorship on an ongoing basis.

Professional ($100 yearly)

• In addition to the benefits above, all Professional members will receive a Social Media Club T-Shirt.
• Additional benefits for this membership level and above are being negotiated and actively sought. If you are interested in offering your services to our membership, please join as a Small Business member or above.
• An opportunity to be listed in the Social Media Speakers Bureau and/or listing your books, ebooks or other services in the Social Media Club store.
• Professional members who display their membership badge receive 5% on new member referral commission.

Media, Small Business and Corporate

• These membership levels include a number of Professional Memberships for employee representatives of the company:
  • Small Business ($250) includes three (3) professional memberships
  • Media ($1,000) receives five (5) professional memberships
  • Corporate ($2,499) receives ten (10) memberships
  • Additional memberships can be purchased at a discounted rate. Contact socialmediaclub [at] gmail [dot] com for more details.
• Media, Small Business and Corporate members receive a special listing in our organization directory guide for product and service providers to the Social Media industry.
• These membership levels will have the opportunity to offer promotions or discounts to other members through the Web site (but they will not have the opportunity to spam or abuse our email lists with ads). Offering benefits to other members fits with our philosophy that everyone can improve the commons for everyone.
• Our organization memberships also have the opportunity to sponsor our various events, round tables, workshops, seminars, conferences and unconferences. Only members will be able to sponsor these events – this is another way to support the principle that companies must participate within communities rather than trying to merely sell to them.

They also have answers to some FAQs:

Membership Questions

What are the benefits of joining Social Media Club?
We see the greatest benefit of membership as being able to associate with other people from around the world who really ‘get it’ – to learn from them, to share with them, to do business with them and to collaborate with them on both commercial and social projects. We want to help you create more opportunities for discovering the key insights that will advance your personal and professional passions, while contributing to the collective benefit for the broader community. We also think you will have a great opportunity to build a reputation that will lead to both speaking and consulting opportunities aplenty.

Ultimately, we will be offering a unique blend of association benefits such as discounts, free access to many of our events and discounted educational opportunities from other groups. We combine these benefits with support for the many ad-hoc groups that are forming as a result of the DIY and Unconference ethic.

In contrast to the typical associations though, we will also offer an array of online services such as our social network (aka: member directory) and some other interesting peer to peer support services which will be announced Summer 2009. Additionally, small business, media and corporate members have the opportunity to offer their products or services to other members though our ‘member directory’ which includes an opportunity to offer special promotions and other discounts to other members.

By investing now in the formation of Social Media Club, we will reward your faith in our efforts with many other unique opportunities in the future.

Why is there an “Open Membership” offered for free? Won’t that prevent you from accomplishing your goals?
We want to be different than other associations or clubs by creating our organization based upon the values that have brought us to this point in the evolution of the Web – being open, free and inclusive rather than closed, expensive and exclusive. While Open members won’t get all the same benefits as other membership levels, they will be an important part of the community learning and sharing along with the rest of us – together. We don’t believe that the ability of someone to pay a large sum of money is an indicator of the potential value they can contribute, but we do need to have the other paid levels of membership so we can cultivate and support the broader efforts of the community. Rather than believing it will prevent us from achieving our goals we feel it is the only way to accomplish them. While not everything in the world can be free, the Web has certainly proved that some things, particularly those that benefit from scale and network effects, can be. At this point in time, we are happy to welcome Open members, but would ask that you seriously consider becoming a paid member if you share our beliefs about the need for something like Social Media Club and have the financial ability to do so.

[snip]

We hope that you will agree with us in regards to how important it is at this crucial point in time to have an organization that stands for real values around ethics, transparency and honesty that also supports the widening acceptance of Social Media across society to encourage broader participation in the global conversation while working together for our mutual benefit as an emerging industry. Chris Heuer was an early pioneer of the first wave of social computing in the mid-90’s, and spent a lot of time teaching people the basics of hyperlinks Web browsers. Now that the technology is more mature and the network is well connected around the globe, we can more effectively use his lessons learned and our ability to share with one another to help spread this knowledge more efficiently – while ensuring that the principles of being a good ‘Etienne’ are not lost as part of the growing pains.

We have a lot of rational exuberance – which is both good and healthy!

Is there some joke with the $2,499 corporate membership?
Actually no. Chris Heuer has always been a fan of ‘plain pricing’ for the purpose of simplicity, but in working with corporations you begin to realize that many people in organizations have a spending authority limit of $2,500. So this price point is intended to make it easier for people inside organizations to join by making the decision for themselves instead of needing to seek out the approval of many layers of management.

General Questions

How big will Social Media Club grow, and how important will it be in our industry?
No one can say for sure, but all indications are that we are on a high growth path with the right mind set to bridge the divide between those who get it and those who really want to understand the right way to leverage Social Media and participate in the conversation. We can tell you that not a week goes by without another person contacting us to set up a Social Media Club in a new city. We’ve had initial meeting sizes from a few people to greater than 150 – and that’s without any marketing expenses other than posting the meetings to various online calendars, blogging about it, and sending out a few emails through friends. In short, the growth we have seen so far is all the result of word of mouth and participation in the conversation through Social Media tools.

We are forming as a 501c3 (non-profit, though we lovingly like to call it ‘not for loss’) organization
We seek revenues from membership dues and other sources so that we can organize for the collective benefit of the community. In our years of experience working with user groups and associations, it is clear that the ones that have some part-time or full-time management are the ones that last and grow. This costs money, and time.

We are seeking reasonable profits and expect to produce more measured social good within the world. We also will seek to support other ad-hoc efforts as they emerge (and the ones that are already going strong such as the San Francisco Podcaster Meetup and the New Tech Meetups in NYC and Silicon Valley).

As social entrepreneurs we will continue to facilitate donations and fundraising for other worthy non-profit causes like Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Electronic Frontier Foundation and other worthy projects that our membership brings to our attention. We’ve already done so with our Web 2.2 event, where excess cash went to the Creative Commons and the Internet Archive.

Local Group Questions

Will members have to pay separate membership dues to the local group as well as to the central organization?
We hope that we can find a different model to fund some local events through our national organizations, but believe that each local group will be somewhat different. We don’t want to impose a lot of unnecessary structure on each local group, but we do want to encourage the use of best practices and ensure some consistency of events. As a work in progress, this is expected to change, perhaps drastically, but will only happen as a result of a conversation with the community.

We do expect that the local groups may require small fees or donations to cover costs of convening the group (room rental and refreshments typically). Local organizers will use their best efforts to limit that and will seek donated space and refreshment sponsors wherever possible.

What are some of the things we’ll do together?
We’ve seen the power of the self-organizing, DIY movement to bring together ad-hoc groups and organize Unconferences quickly, with low budgets and high quality interactions. We’ve organized several of these ourselves and helped numerous others do their own from around the world. In this process, we’ve discovered that there are tremendous benefits to the fully participant-driven organizational model, but there is still some value in a more structured, planned and professionally managed event. Social Media Club will leverage the best lessons from both of these worlds and apply the right sort of facilitation for the particular purpose of the gathering. We will take the best of the loosely structured, just in time agenda’s of the Unconference and combine it with an organization that can accept money, pay for venues, take out insurance, and have some fairly-paid staff to ensure that things run right, without becoming a formal organization and event management firm. This means if you’re running a meeting and you need our help, if you’re running an Unconference and you need a little structure – we’re here to help you with whatever resources we can reasonably bring to bear.

Ok, I accept that all of that is a lot to read. So here’s my précis:

Précis

By co-ordinating our activities we can potentially achieve more than doubling up on activities across the various social media groups around Adelaide. If necessary, we can set up sub-groups to handle particular themes; for example, not everyone would be interested in the activities of the PR/marcoms folks, nor of the uber-geek coders adding bleeding-edge tools to their armoury and alpha-testing widgets on their blogs – but I am very sure that we would all love to know what generalisable results they found if it turns out the new you-beaut widget is a winner!

A regular monthly meeting, where each month we can ask subject matter experts to share their findings, report on the latest developments, present case studies, and so on, would be a good thing to have in this town, methinks. We can always run the formal meeting for, say, a maximum of one hour, then dive into drinks and food afterwards…

I’d LOVE to have a meeting with all those representatives/organisers from the various groups to see if my idea is a ‘go-er’.

What say you? Comments below, or via twitter (please use the hashtag #smcadl so we can all follow it) or on the facebook SMC Adelaide page.

For the general edification (ahem) of those wonderfully smart, witty and all-round drop-dead gorgeous folks who kindly attend my social media workshops for Melcrum, I have updated my resources page to include some red-hot material.

I naturally won’t post the link to the resources page here — you attendees know where it is!

• Social applications boost productivity
  Says the Divine Miss Heidi, "This is what I took away from the plethora of statistics in this report: * Personal and professional are one and the same. Get over it. * Consider personal use of new tools a beta-test of professional application. "
  (tags: socialmedia socialnetworking web2.0 productivity heidimiller)

• Information Takes Over » Blog-in-Blog Wordpress Plugin
  Allows you to have a page that shows post-level category articles. Confused? It's easier to understand when you see it in action. Very simple and handy.
  (tags: wordpress webdev development cms plugins)

• How Do You Measure the ROI of Social Media? You Don't.
  How Do You Measure the ROI of Social Media? You Don't.
  (tags: socialmedia roi social media brain marketing hubspot socialmediaroi toread work)
• 26 Excellent Presentations On Social Media For Non Profits (Add YOUR Ideas In Comments!) | Blog of Mr. Tweet
  If you’ve been thinking of launching or expanding your organization in social media, Slideshare is a good starting point for information and advice. But it can be time-consuming to pick through a wide range of slideshows to find those that are up-to-date, actionable, and appropriate to nonprofits
  (tags: socialmedia socialnetworking web2.0 social presentation twitter facebook nonprofit fundraising)

Watch out! There's a Grumpy Old Man about!

I blogged about this earlier, but at the request of a couple of emailers, here’s the third of 10 ‘clues’ you need to ‘get’ if you want to engage meaningfully with curmudgeons like me.
[clue one is here, [clue two is here]

Firstly, some background…

Building on from Tip Two, we curmudgeons want to preserve the things we value: you know, like our health, our wealth, our teeth, our collection of childhood navel fluff, our toenail clippings, and so on.

One of the basic psychological tenets (ask your friendly local psychologist — me if you happen to be nearby; I’m usually friendly during daylight hours and if you wave large denominations of cash at me) is that we are more scared of losing something than we are of gaining something.

That’s why direct marketers always talk about ‘time limited offer’ and “call within the next 30 minutes and you…” and so on.

The unspoken psychological button is that we risk losing something if we don’t ring in the next 30 minutes, or don’t respond within 48 hours to that special web-only offer (you know the one, the offer that if you go back to that page 48 hours later it will still be saying you only have 48 hours left; the end-date of the offer ‘magically’ changes. It’s a simple piece of web script – get over it).

But trust me and a million web and direct marketers — you WILL be more motivated to purchase if you risk losing something — even if it’s something you don’t actually want! Your psychology ‘talks’ you into creating ’solid, valid, logical reasons’ why you suddenly need that dual overhead flanging scrumption-shiner, even if you don’t even know what it is or what it does.

So, Tip Three: show us how to hold on to what we have, be it our house, our nest egg, our health, our mobility, our self-respect.

Watch out! There's a Grumpy Old Man about!

I blogged about this earlier, but at the request of a couple of emailers, here’s the second of 10 ‘clues’ you need to ‘get’ if you want to engage meaningfully with curmudgeons like me. [clue one is here]

Firstly, some background…

If you have been raised in a Western culture you have probably also been brought up with a ‘Protestant’ work ethic — meaning that you take it on your shoulders to carry the burden of generating enough income to support ourselves and loved ones once you retire.

But with the figure of $1million being banded about as the ‘minimum’ you need to enjoy a comfortable (and no more than that) retirement, how many of us can put hand on heart and say we have at least that stashed away.

I used to be a cat burglar. True. I’ve got a Swiss bank account with 40,000 cats in it. [boom tish]

We curmudgeons are very interested in all this money and investing stuff (yes, especially after you U.S. merchant bankers stuffed the world for the rest of us!), but we are risk-averse in case we drop a bundle right before we retire and have no means to recoup it.

We also, despite views to the contrary, haven’t completely lost ALL our marbles: we are still able to and interested in finding out more about the topics that interest us, like social media, history, adolescent taxidermy (that’ll fix those blimmin’ neighbourhood teenagers!), investing for dummies, and so on.

So, Tip Two: offer us continuing education on financial matters, and position your financial products as providing above-average market returns with lower-than-average risk.

Good bloody on ‘em! They started before anyone else. They listened to the conversations and comments about their first foray. They regrouped and they entered the conversation again.

Stop the bloody whinging, Australia – at least they are IN THE MIX – how many other Aussie blue chips are?

Santos? Westpac? NAB? Any effin’ mining companies? Westfield?

Come on, fellow social media luminaries -  let’s CELEBRATE someone having the intestinal fortitude to START opening up their ‘closed shop’ culture. How many other Aussie blue chips are ready to even begin unravelling their culture to be ‘open’ instead of fish-sphincteringly closed.

Watch out! There's a Grumpy Old Man about!

I blogged about this earlier, but at the request of a couple of emailers, here’s the first of 10 ‘clues’ you need to ‘get’ if you want to engage meaningfully with curmudgeons like me.

Firstly, some background…

Curmudgeons my age don’t think of ourselves as ‘old’ — as in all of life, ‘old’ is relative (I have some old relatives) and is usually 20 years more than one currently is.

But irrespective of whether we ‘think’ we are old or not, we quite often ‘enjoy’ the following:

• Onset of illness or health worries
• Frustration with new technology and our seeming inability to ‘pick it up’ like dem’ dangnabbit young whipper-snappers seem to
• Feeling obsolete or irrelevant as far as the mainstream (aka youth-oriented) culture appears
• Lack of energy
• Insomnia (or unable to ‘bounce out of bed and greet the dawn’)
• Weight gain (not me, of course, but OTHER curmudgeons, of course!)
• Hair loss or turning into a replica of Santa Claus
• Teeth looking old and raggedy, or just plain falling apart
• Eyesight fading
• Loss of hearing.
• I said, LOSS OF HEARING you old fart
• Enlarged prostate (I won’t bore you with the details)
• Worries about having enough dollars in the bank in retirement
• Lack of relevance as the family moves out and ‘Grumpa’ makes the grandchildren cry when he looks at them

YES, yes, yes… we have more free time, a sense of achievement in our career or life (hopefully), and a retirement to look forward to (no having to deal with rush hour traffic, nor that inane new boss, for starters).

But the many drawbacks of getting ‘old’ make us more likely to be curmudgeonly than saintly, and the targets of our complaints are the usual suspects: the banks, the pharmaceutical companies, the health system, why policemen look so flamin’ young, the government (federal, state and local), taxes, the media, politicians, and teenagers.

So, Tip One: if you can identify what irks the particular GOM you wish to talk to, and empathise with their antipathy for their particular enemy of choice, you can bond on a deeper level than if you just came wading in to a conversation like a used car salesman.

Norton Internet Security 2010: I give it a 7/10.

Lee Hopkins on YouTube

Norton Internet Security 2010

Good points:
* NOT a resource hog (see the video)
* tons of great information in a great, easy to understand interface
* FINALLY Norton allows you back up/copy your ‘Identity Safe’ data from one pc to another ['Identity Safe' is the username/password stuff, credit card info, etc., that Norton stores securely -- I just wish I knew where so I could change it to my Dropbox]
* very fast when scanning

Dislikes:
* a big box for just a cd (I know, this is an old complaint, but it never hurts to re-iterate it)
* your usb stick is the ONLY place you can store your backup ‘Identity Safe’ data – no, I cannot store it in my Dropbox. Booo!
* the ‘other’ pc must also be running NIS 2010 – not overly handy when you find yourself in a web cafe or the Qantas Lounge
* is my laptop getting old, or do I have to ‘wake up’ ‘Identity Safe’ by clicking on the Norton toolbar when going to my first password-protected site for the day?
* why no toolbar for Google Chrome? I actually quite like it as a browser…

Disclaimer: NIS 2010 review copy sent to me from Norton – thanks, Natalie!