Chris Heuer and Howard Greenberg pitched Social Media Club, the first user-generated startup.

From the blog: ” 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.”

Heuer said, “The big challenge is in connecting the structured world with the ad hoc, do it yourself world that’s emerging and find a balance between the two. In different situations, you need one more than the other. We’d like to bring a bit of light structure to the grassroots, ad hoc stuff that’s going on.”

Anyone and everyone is invited to be co-founders and co-creators. “We want to figure it out together.” To become a cofounder costs $250; standard membership is $100. The money will be used to build a central administrative core, said Howard Greenstein, one of the Social Media Club originators. Greenberg formed the first Web Artists Consortium (WAC), which spawned the original digital agencies including Razorfish.

“In order to build this kind of thing, typically you go to Microsoft and ask them to be a platinum sponsor,” Greenberg said. “We believe there’s a community here, we’re asking the community to contribute to seed the funding for it.”

Meetings already are happening regularly in ten cities around the world.

“The idea is to connect with people with shared values and passions around the world — who’d like to see things get better in the world,” Heuer said. Social Media Club is a refocus of his nonprofit Brain Jams on social media. “Our first thinking is the promotion of tech literacy, helping the ‘dead tree people’ understand what we understand.

“When we say co-creators, we mean it,” Heuer says. “We’ll have our business plan in a wiki that’s available to all the co-creators.”

–Susan Kuchinskas

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