Jenny Schmitt bio:
Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt is a veteran public relations and marketing professional, trainer and sought-after public speaker. Her 15-year marketing and communications career includes experience in the fields of sports marketing, nonprofit marketing, healthcare communications, and public relations.
Inspired by Mashable’s 100 Upcoming Social Media and Technology Conferences list, we cracked open our planners and decided where we could invest our time in learning this fall. We decided on a few national conferences, opted for a few marketing, technology, and PR meetings, but when we got to the topic of social media, we were nearly crushed with the options. While we’d like to go to BlogWorld and APPNation, we needed to consider just how much time we could spend out of the office and our carbon footprint (Jenny’s traveling to speak in Houston at IS Conference and in San Diego at LavaCon). To save on time, we considered only social media conferences and events in Atlanta. To our surprise, we found a dozen* social media conferences and meetings in Atlanta happening before the calendar flips to the new year. What’d we find? Take a look:
While we’re narrowing down our options, reviewing speakers, and the value we’d get for our time out of the office, tell us how you decide on what conferences to attend? If you are coming to any of these conferences or headed to Atlanta for the first time, let’s be social and connect while you’re here. (Know about a conference we missed? Send us an email and let us know.)
*Thanks to Scott Lockhart (@scott_regator) for sending us the info on Mashable’s Atlanta event on Sept. 30. And to Lane Bailey for sending us info about REBarCamp on Oct. 1. We knew this town was busy.
Earlier this week, we shared a small social experiment – we were able to discover key details and specific information by browsing the social media profiles of four people we recently met at a local networking event. The results surprised us and got us thinking more about how casual people tend to be in very public places online.
Are you careful about what you say in public places? Do you ever really know who you’re talking to at a party? Do you mind if people eavesdrop your conversations at Starbucks? Do you let people read your laptop screen while you sit on the airplane? You’re probably socially attuned to all of these and careful about information that you’re revealing when you’re interacting this way in the real world, but you think differently about privacy in the online world. People tend to have this inflated presumption of privacy and they’re less careful about what they reveal. If fact, your privacy expectations and behaviors may be altered if you begin to think about a reality analog to the different types of social situations that you’re encountering through social media. You would probably be surprised how much people can learn about you because of the way you’re treating the online world differently than you act in the real one.
Let’s look at real-world analogies of the most common social networking sites and see how it might make you think differently about your privacy expectations. When you interact with people on Facebook, think of it as how you might act at a wedding reception. You either know everyone there or you have met a lot of them or, at the very least, you trust that they’re ok because the bride and groom invited them there. So you can let your guard down a little bit, share pictures, even drink a little too much and say stupid stuff. But you don’t really know everyone there, do you? You can’t be sure that everybody there was invited to the wedding. So you can’t completely trust everyone there, but on Facebook you pour your heart and personal information out on the table for everybody to sort through it.
If Facebook is a wedding reception, then Twitter is neighborhood bar on a Thursday night. You know a couple of people there, maybe even some good friends, but you have to assume everything you do and say in that bar might be heard by anybody. And you have no idea who those people are or if you can trust them. And who is the creepy guy that’s hanging around and listening to everything you have to say? You might reveal some personal things to your friends, but other people are listening.
If Twitter is a neighborhood bar, then social sites like Chatroulette or adults in MySpace are a shady nightclub downtown. You can’t really trust anything you hear or see there, but you might go there to let loose and have fun sometimes. Or maybe you just go there for bands that you like. You’re definitely going to see a different crowd at that nightclub then you might at the wedding reception last weekend, so you probably are going to put your guard up a little bit. You definitely can’t trust much of anything you see or hear there, and there might even be illegal things around. Plus, nightclubs never seem to stay open for very long.
If you don’t go to bars, then LinkedIn is much like your last professional networking meeting. You go to those types of events to meet like-minded people and to make contacts for business development, job searching or to just grow your network. You have casual and professional conversations with people and hand out business cards, but you don’t normally walk around handing out resumes. But that’s what you do on LinkedIn, right? Except on LinkedIn, the whole world can read all of those details, not just the self-selective group at your networking event. And again, these are people that are a step above strangers off the street, but you’re still not going to reveal tons of personal details to them until you get to know them, or when you run into them at a wedding.
If people thought about these real-world situations a bit when they are interacting socially in the online world, perhaps they would reveal a little bit less. Would you walk in a bar and tell everyone all of that?
If you’re on social media, guess what? You reveal more than you know.
The debate on privacy in the social space took another huge leap this past week. The Wall Street Journal’s ran an in-depth, investigative series titled, “What They Know.” The eye-pooping, jaw-dropping insights in the series (here, here and it continues here) left little doubt that your digital footprint is easier to track and identify than you might realize. But The Wall Street Journal has a big staff, time to investigate, and an editorial directive to find the story.
What could a person like me find out about, say, some people they met at recent networking events?
From a recent handful of business cards I gathered at a networking event, I poked around on social networking sites to see just what people reveal about them to the rest of the world – without cookies, spyware, or other data-gathering tricks. This was a simple search to see just how much I could learn about four people. What’s surprising is that I found a lot of details that I’m not certain these four folks know just how much they’ve put out there. Among the details, I learned:
where they went to college
where they went to high school
how old they are
where they live
where they were born
what nationality they are
what religion they are
everywhere they’ve ever worked
how many kids they have (I even got to see photos and videos)
what their spouses do for a living
who they voted for in recent elections
what their primary hobbies are
what movies they had recently seen
what bands/music they like
what books they’ve read in recent months
what restaurants they’ve been to in the last month
and where they’re traveling to right now
Remember, this was just me, looking at public info they’ve posted on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others.
So what are you opening revealing about yourself? Perhaps more than you know.
This fall, I’ll be speaking at LavaCon in San Diego on generations and the social experience. The popular conference is focused heavily on the digital and social media experience. The way they phrase it, they’re focused ‘on how to develop, manage and publish digital content that enhances the customer experience, reduces production costs and promotes your online brand.’ Who’d the conference really for? Marketers, public relations pros, brand managers, project managers and anyone with a hankering to learn more about making digital and social media work well for their brand.
And here’s the better part: you can save $50 off of registration by using the discount code CLOUDSPARK. Register by July 9 and take advantage of early registration rates. (Psst, wanna know what we’re doing with our $50? Sneak a peek!)
If you decide to go, let us know, we’d love to meet up in beautiful San Diego.
“In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of privacy.”
For now, Facebook efforts to own the new social web are facing a backlash from its blatant invasion of your privacy (and the privacy of your friends). The company has made it ever-challenging to keep control of personal data on the side of consumers using its services. With changing updates coming in rapid succession, defaults set at opt-in, it’s easy for consumers to not know, or be confused about, what they are agreeing to share and to disclose. For Facebook, their trappling of privacy is another rung in their effots to control data, remember it wasn’t that long ago that Facebook asserted content rights over nearly all data: writing, photos, art, etc. Read the rest of this entry »
With the fast pace of sports – an industry with ever-changing leaders, teams, athletes, seasons, sponsors, opportunities – it’s no wonder that keeping up with the rapid pace of social media can be a challenge. This week, the Atlanta chapter of Women in Sports and Events, invited me to present a social media primer for sports and event professionals. Having worked in the several areas of sports, I jumped at the chance. Read the rest of this entry »
You’ve heard about Twitter right? You join about 87% of Americans who’ve heard of it, but maybe you’re part of the 93% who haven’t ventured to try it for personal or for business. While there are lots of case studies to show innovate ways to use Twitter and proof it leads to sales, you just don’t know how to start or if you should. You’re not alone.
We frequently present on Twitter for business. It’s so important to help people get started, especially businesses, that Twitter posts a Twitter for Business Guide on its homepage. But before you get there, let us help you with the first steps.
This presentation was given at Atlanta’s Freelancer’s Forum last week. While a lot of learning happened off the screen, these are the basic steps to get start in and understand more about the world’s most popular short-message platform.
We’ve been telling visual stories for nearly our entire careers. Why? Visual matters because most people are visual learners or can better recall a visual cue than a written one. When YouTube came around 5 years ago a whole new opportunity came up to tell that story directly to an audience – no media required. We’ve been on board every since.
Now wait, if someone tells you they can make a viral video for you, stop there. You (or your agency) can’t make a video viral, you can make it great. Only your audience, your customers, your fans, can take it viral. No matter, even if you think you have a tough product or service, there is always a visual story.
We’re sharing this new branded YouTube page from The Coca-Cola Company. It’s a soon-to-be-classic example (created by Sapient Nitro – deep talent over there) of just where video can take a customer. Coca-Cola a global leader in the refreshment category has taken the World Cup ritual (the on-field celebrations) and asked fans to share their own celebrations if they were playing on the field. Here’s why we think Coca-Cola succeeds:
1. It lets people (the fans) participate directly: send in video, artwork, photography (branded or not)
2. The content is seemingly new, refreshed, all the time and it’s easy to share
3. Coca-Cola can tie-in the campaign with actual events (note the videos with the branded banner)
4. The music is universally appealing, borrowing beats, harmonies from different cultures
5. For a global brand, the World Cup is a near-perfect opportunity to showcase its near-universal appeal
What videos do you think stand out as examples of a great visual story? What would you add?
For a follow up from our ealier presentation, Social Media 101, I presented a second session at today’s PRSA/GA Annual Conference in Atlanta, Ga. More conceptual, this session was focused on discussing the forthcoming trends, some of which like Real Time and geolocation are already happening. While the audience was PR professionals, these trends are certain to impact brands and bottom lines in the near future. After all, it was only 3 years ago when people were saying, “What’s this Twitter thing about?” Like my earlier session, I used the new Prezi format, which won rave reviews from the audience.
Oh, and if you’re really geeked now, check out Akoha, a company that blends geolocation with good deeds, and augmented reality app Layar which let’s you see, what you don’t see, and keep your eyes on other companies pushing the envelope of what’s possible. Or drop a note here and let us know who those companies are.
Today, I presented at the PRSA/GA Annual Conference in Atlanta, Ga. This presentation to PR professionals focused on providing the basics of social media – definitions, demographics, and details – they would need to enhance/advance a company’s brand. It was also the first time I debuted the new Prezi format, which won rave reviews from the audience.
