Jared W. Smith

The Social Media Club Charleston steering group is meeting in a few days to review 2009 and look forward to 2010. It’s been a great kickoff year for SMC (at least from my perspective), with a core of great engagement and a fresh helping of new faces at each meeting. If you’ve attended one of our panels or networking events this year, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you! You’re making Charleston’s technology and social media community stronger by participating.

Here’s another chance to participate — I’m interested in what kind of panels and events you might want to see next year. This is what’s on my drawing board so far:

• A frank discussion about disclosure online. Social media’s nature is driven by disclosure — but are we giving away too much? I’d love to see a local privacy expert or two come out of the woodwork to help us with this discussion. Privacy is a big part of our culture, and a discussion about how much privacy we’re ceding using tools like Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite (and, in some cities, Foursquare) and the like could be incredibly enlightening.
• A panel about crisis communication in the age of social media. After last week’s AdFed U panel, Lyn Mettler, Mike Haskins (Executive VP for Marketing at College of Charleston) and I got to talking and crisis communication — and how it’s changed — came up. One of the high points of my college career was a seminar on crisis communication put on by CofC’s Department of Communication Advisory Council, in which we had to generate a response to the Firestone/Ford Explorer incidents in 2000, where faulty tires caused a number of traffic accidents, some fatal. (I blogged about it shortly afterward if you care to read more and don’t mind my awful 2006 style.) Three years ago, we talked about stalling the press with refusing to comment and waiting for a statement. With social media, everybody’s the press, and it’s very hard to stall a tidal wave. This would be an incredibly beneficial panel.
• And, of course, the networking events people love. We like to put the “social” into “social media,” and we’ll continue to do so.

The floor’s yours now — what do you want to know about? Sound off in comments.

After a few months of hard work and preparation, Charleston will officially launch its chapter of Social Media Club tonight with a panel of journalists asking them how social media’s transformed how they engage with their audience. Here’s the event page for tonight’s panel on Facebook.

It’s very befitting that the kickoff event for Charleston’s Social Media Club is a panel with local media professionals. After all, the roots of our blogging community stem from local media’s efforts to reach out to local bloggers all the way back in April of 2006. The founders of that effort, Dan and Janet (Edens) Conover, will be on the panel, along with Ken Hawkins from TheDigitel.com, Andy Owens of the Charleston Regional Business Journal, and Raymond Owens, a producer at WCBD Channel 2 who was well ahead of the curve by being the first broadcast media presence in Charleston to do newsgathering via Twitter (well before WCBD’s station-wide push into social media earlier this year).

Social Media Club Charleston has been in the works for a few months now. Jeff Webster and Nick Tompkins kicked off the effort just before the 2008 holiday season. Heather Solos of Lowcountry Bloggers and Home-Ec 101, local social media/PR pro Lyn Mettler, Blackbaud’s Chad Norman, and yours truly rounded out the initial leadership group and has been laying the groundwork for this launch over the last few months. Thanks to help from The Graduate School of the College of Charleston, we’re able to put on this event for you. It’s stating the obvious to say we’re ridiculously excited to bring SMC to Charleston.

Between the rockstar panel and the wonderful opportunity to meet lots of new people, tonight should be a lot of fun. Tweet your thoughts using the #smcchs hashtag, and we hope to see you there. The event will be at Maybank Hall on the College of Charleston campus at 6:30. (Here’s a map to Maybank Hall.)