Social Media Club Atlanta Chapter
Last night I attended a meeting of the Atlanta chapter of the Social Media Club led by Peter Fasano and Tessa Horehled at Manuel’s tavern. It’s been a little over a month since I had been there standing among screaming Democrats watching the presidential election results.
As I have written before, the Social Media Club was co-founded by Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells and has chapters across the country. As they say, “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.”
Tessa’s motivation for helping to bring the Social Media Club back to Atlanta was that she wanted to build community and “dispel some false, inauthentic notions of what social media is.” Peter has spent considerable time in San Francisco and wants to bring some of that passion for social media and new ideas to Atlanta.
Roughly 30 people were at hand for the chapter’s second meeting. The event was sponsored by Regator, which is urging people to vote for their site for the Open Web Awards.
The topic was social media and retail. The conversation initially centered on customer service, but candidly came alive when Jason Brett talked about his newly founded company called Jumbis. The company generates single product sales websites that turn buyers into evangelists.
The idea is that a customer gets discounts for sending out messages via Twitter, email, etc telling his or her friends that he or she bought something.
Some call it leveraging your social network; others call it spam. Peter said it reminded him of the pay for post efforts of a few years ago. Jason was soliciting feedback from the group because he wants to make money, but he also wants to do it ethically.
Needless to say, the commercial aspect of the notification turned some people off. Others worried about the relevancy and frequency of the notifications.
As Amber Rhea co-founder of Georgia Podcast Network said, I have no problem reading a random posting about an awesome donut you just had at a particular donut shop; it’s another thing to be paid for doing it.
Ultimately, what I found most interesting was that we were having a discussion about Jumbis in the first place. Jumbis was founded at Atlanta’s Startup Weekend 2 last month where fellow entrepreneurs rightly praised its founders for developing the idea so quickly. Then last night the idea was filtered through a social media sieve. In other words, the startup community and the social media community came together to share ideas and help make Jumbis more successful.
In light of the new Administration coming in, hopefully this sharing of ideas at a bar in Atlanta is a sign of new things to come in the City’s technology community.
Let me get back to you.
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