Last night I snuck into the Social Media Club event in Boston. It was sold out but since the event was 4 blocks from my house I decided to see if I could make it through the door. A reader of my other blog turned me on to the event and I’m glad I went. It was part un-conference/ad-hoc collaboration, with the guests mainly being in the PR and marketing industry, talking about all things social media.

Social Media Club is being organized 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.

The tag line for the Social Media Club is “If you get it, share it.” Appropriate.

The only person I knew in the room was Steve Garfield, who I met at Blogtoberfest a few weeks ago. My media days in Boston were in the early 90′s and I’m excited to reconnect, learn and lot and hopefully share some of experience and insight I’ve had with blogs, RSS, SecondLife and other social media-related stuff.

The Social Media Club Boston blog.

Chris Heuer did a great job of moderating and keeping the conversation flowing. While we were all way too unfocused in the group discussions, it was a good starting point for future conversations as people’s clue density increases.

One thing I wished for during the evening event were more advanced discussions to participate in. Many of the participants were of the dead-tree old school mentality and while I relish discussion about blogs and marketing, it would be nice to have have more advanced tracks for those of us who are a bit farther along the curve that most. But that wasn’t the focus of the event.

One interesting initiative I learned about is the Social Media Press Release. They also call it hRelease, which is a silly name I refuse to use. SMPR is a “community effort to define a new format for press releases via a community standard microformat.”

I read a lot of press releases, and 95% of them are garbage, there art of effective press release writing went out the door at some point. The the social media release is an effort to add structure to press releases to make them more accessible. Hopefully some best practices standards will evolve in parallel, because we don’t need RSS feeds full of the same old crap IMHO. I hope they build in a rating system where junk press releases don’t get the link love and exposure that well-crafted information gets the attention it needs. That will be super-useful.

There is an SMPR wiki. Go forth and contribute.

Speaking of attention, I can’t wait till that room of people gets a load of the Attention Trust and Attention Economy. It’s going to blog their minds.

More SMPR coverage from Todd Defren at PR-Squared.com, who I met last night and the Online Marketing Blog. Brian Solis has some good information about SMPR as well. David Meerman was there too.

After the event the Topaz had an informat gtg/dinner downstairs at Brasserie JO. the oysters and fries were delicious. I ran into Julian Bourne, who was a speaker at Boston University’s Business School last year where I was speaking about online dating and social networking. Julian founded Proxpro, which brings consolidated employment histories, bios and photos to your mobile phone. He writes the Proxpro blog.

After that was a trip to Wally’s for Latin Night and then hospitality industry night at Toro, an unexpected bonus which was not good for my cold.
I still can’t find what to tag the event.

Thanks to the Topaz folks for putting together a decent event.