Over the past several months there has been a significant increase in the number of social media-related events occurring nationwide.  These events range from formal educational seminars and full-day events with multiple speakers to networking social events and tweetups over lunch or on a weeknight.  If the target audience for your business is using social media, which is increasingly the case, it makes business sense for your company to start participating in these events through event sponsorship.

If you’ve been reading my blog and following my tweets, you’ll know that I am a huge evangelizer of StumbleUpon for marketing and professional use.  I consume my media a little different than other people.  I’m not an RSS person.  I know the blogs and websites that I find resourceful and will visit them.  I search for the latest conversations on Twitter to see what people are talking about.  And I use StumbleUpon to help me find new sources of relevant information that I might be interested in but might never have found otherwise.

Let me explain it...

Social media and your privacy is an intriguing topic that we should all be concerned about.  On the one hand, Pete Cashmore of Mashable has already rightfully declared some time ago that Privacy is Dead.  On the other hand, there are those who are actually still afraid to join a social networking site because of privacy concerns.  It is these people that I want to address in this blog post.

This week I got this question from my reader:

I have always used alias names and blind emails everywhere online to protect my personal info from ID Theft.  Because I have a high credit score, I so far have not been ready to open up, what do you think?

Let me point out that...

Below is a summary of the question that I recently received:

I was wondering if you had any quick tidbits of advice for how to sell the benefits of using social media to ones own marketing department. As you know there are many who feel uncomfortable with Facebook and Twitter and feel that it is only used for play. I handle HR for a staffing agency and our recruiters and sales people are begging for the permission to use social media. Our marketing department is tentative about opening up use to everyone for fear that “something bad will happen” – my fear is if we don’t open it up then nothing will happen. We are behind the curve and I...