I will admit, when the evening began with everyone in the room passing the mike and giving their elevator pitch, I was worried. There were over 60 women in the room and, one by one, they shared their name, job, employ—in many cases their own small business—and their twitter handle. I feared it would take all night but in a few minutes it was over. I found the exercise creepy; there was something evangelical about it, but I succumbed and came to realise that this spirit of promotion and openness was at the heart of the event.
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The first Digital Citizens event tonight was a robust discussion on personal versus private online. The title of the evening was Private Parts: Personality and Disclosure – Finding a Balance in the Digital Space. Surprisingly it was the lawyer on the panel, Adrian Dayton (of Social Media for Lawyers) who was sounding like the ad man encouraging people to establish their personal brand and get it all out there on twitter. Sam North of Ogilvy PR, was reminding people of their contractual obligations to their employers and clients with words of warning to not speak badly about them. But, as ever in the social media space the lines quickly become hard to define. As soon as he described Ogilvy’s social media guidelines Damian Damjanovski of BMF spoke of one’s digital footprint, and that if we are active on social media platforms we will become traceable someway or another regardless of privacy settings on the content of accounts. The discussion then turned into what should one disclaim in their profiles: do you disclaim who you work for? Do you express the views as yours and not representative of your employer?
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