Social Media Seminar
Last night I took Brad Feld’s advice and attended an ATLAS seminar on Social Networking: Using Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The speaker, Matt Galligan (aka IndieKid) of SocialThing was a smart guy, clearly into his topic/on top of his topic, was entertainingly nervous & seemingly enjoying beginning public speaking.
What struck me was:
- His examples of “don’t be stupid online” were (all? I think all) more examples of how somebody else posted something that reflected poorly on the person. Basically personal privacy is gone, offline as well as online. Perhaps choose your friends and enemies amongst technology Luddites.
- Facebook default settings are set to be “broadcast to network” not “to friend”. That is bogus, it got me, it even got Matt. I guess I can see an argument (so folks in town can find you/find out about you), but it goes to show how much we rely upon these networks to “protect us” by default, and that is not their interest.
- The usual suspects came up: Twitter, Flickr, Digg, BrightKite. All can get you in trouble.
- You are your own brand online. Don’t piss in that brands pool. Choose what you do/allow online.
I was amazed at the level of the seminar, since I assume every college kid (and it was at least 2/3 college folks if not more) was an expert in this topic. It was more “here is what these things are/what they do” than “how to use them”, but maybe I misunderstood that title as a tips-n-tricks of “how to use”, when it was intended as a cautionary “how to use” (or not.) That said, from the questions asked, maybe this was exactly what the audience wanted.
Most fun thing I took from the seminar was the Twitterings of Spud Bros in Boulder. I recall the two year (three?) ago craze of “every business needs to get a MySpace page for marketing”. Clearly that is now focusing on Twitter, however folks like Spud Bros (who send out promos in real-time) are really engaging their audience interactively, which feels way more “real”.