Unsocial media club
There is, Dr Mumbo is sorry to report, trouble in social media paradise.
Social Media Club – the parent organisation of chapters including Social Media Club Sydney, Melbourne and possibly others in Australia that haven’t crossed Dr Mumbo’s radar – is embattled on a number of fronts.
Last night came a series of angry tweets from the SocialMediaClub Twitter profile. They’ve had a falling out with a chap called Mike Key, who’d run the Virgina Beach chapter in the US. Apparently he deleted a local SMC Facebook page
The Social Media Club tweet revealed: “Problem with Facebook – one a page is deleted. It is gone. Looks like I will be making a voodoo doll for @mike_key. Total jerk.”
Another tweet added: “This is the problem with social tools. You trust people with your brand, they can fuck you and there is nothing you can do to stop them.”
It was later followed by a tweet from one of the organisers, saying she’d meant to tweet from her personal account.
Meanwhile, the organisation appears to have hit woes on another front, with a posting today saying that it had inexplicably struggled to get people to pay $595 to attend its US-based conference.
And whose fault is that? Those outside the US apparently: “We had been relying upon our global Social Media Club membership, and in particular the leaders of local groups, but this has not worked as we hoped. With multiple attempts to reach out to the local leadership to support this conference, even at times by direct phone call, we were only able to muster a few tickets sold and a few dozen tweets.”
Happily the situation is entirely different in Australia where everybody involved in social media is one big happy family.
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social media
OK I’m in shock – over 2hrs since this was posted and not one comment from the social crowd (or anyone else)..?!
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Hey Tim,
Speaking of social media, are you going to cover the “I like it” campaign on Facebook for Breast Cancer?
Such a successful campaign but I haven’t seen any Media/Advertising sites cover it…
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Social Media – Mashable made a post about this yesterday. The link is http://mashable.com/2010/10/06.....-facebook/
It’s a pretty interesting read especially the comments which seem to give a mixed review on the campaign.
Enjoy!
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Clearly Social Media Club doesn’t have social media guidelines 🙂
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lol
social media.
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First off, you aren’t very keen or kind to suggest I was blaming people outside the US for our conference not working – or are you just that insistent on creating a row? In fact, I take the blame myself for the conference not selling out since I spent the month prior working on another program, trying wholeheartedly to help parents learn basic social media literacy. We learned a lot there too, but between the time away and the lack of interest from our local leaders around the globe to support it as we had hoped, we just didnt reach the ticket sales we needed.
While we could have pulled it off and saved face since that matters to you so much to be throwing egg in ours, we didn’t want to continue work for 6 weeks full time without pay while waiting for the last minute tickets to come in. We could have turned it up and made it work, but as you can see from the feedback from community members, most are independent and can’t afford to travel to a conference. There are other reasons which I wrote about in my article today announcing our postponement of the conference while we work out a new approach.
http://socialmediaclub.org/blo.....university
As for your overblown concern with our making known the unethical, community damaging behaviour of this guy Mike Key, well, he is one interesting fellow. In that we previously did not know him until the founding community leader asked us to help her, saying it was a falling out is a bit of an overstatement.
Kristie laid out a very long, but fully detailed overview of our position and of the time line of events that discredit several of the many lies he has been spouting the past 24 hours. http://socialmediaclub.org/blo.....n-doing-so
What I can tell you about him, is what we have seen in the time since encountering him. When this all went down, after he deleted the community group from Facebook, he deleted his Twitter account with over 1,000 followers – literally in the blink of an eye. Since then, his trigger happy delete finger has continued to click. He has since not only changed the blog post he wrote a few times (which originally contained an apology) but he also now has deleted that post entirely, though you can see it in any feed reader.
Sadly, he found a companion on Twitter who is attacking us for his own personal vengeance. They exchanged more then a dozen tweets, but now Mike has even deleted most of those as he covers his tracks.
This sort of thing sucks all around and is not becoming of anyone, but sometimes its necessary to stand up to someone who harms you. If you care about what they are damaging as passionately as we do about supporting our community leaders globally, the response is going to be emotional. We’ve since acknowledged and apologized for the manner in which we called him out for his bad behaviour and seen about a dozen hypocrites call us all sorts of wonderful names – basically doing the same thing they are accusing us of doing in a beautiful case of hypocrisy.
C’est la vie.
There are much more important things to worry about that this incident shows – more and more people coming into the social spaces we inhabit online with less then the community’s best interest at heart. People who are quick to cover their tracks and only looking out for themselves and their ability to strike social media gold. Yet another reason why I personally get so upset by people like this and those who lift them up as saints and attack me for pointing out the dangerous guy in the room.
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Oh dear. I’m inclined to think that, in an organisation run as democratically as
Social Media Club is, some ructions in and around the organisation are to be expected from time to time – witness the dramas not so long ago in my old, fun-loving home town Sydney itself (and on which if I’m not mistaken you reported). But having been associated with SMC for a while now, I do think that on balance we all get along extremely well, especially considering distances, cultural difference etc.
As to the calling off of the Orlando conference, and speaking as one of the local Aussie “one big happy (social media) family”, I do think it was drawing a rather long bow and provocative (effectively it seems, going on Chris Heuer’s comment) to take the word “global” (in ” global Social Media Club membership”) and interpret that as “those outside the US” – of course, “global” includes those *in* the US. Anyhow, I for one, and as part of the local leadership of SMC, do not see any scope for being offended.
The conference was ambitious, certainly, and given the lineup of speakers I for one thought the price tag quite reasonable.
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Social media types are dicks.
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