Your Personal Digital Footprint (Should you Keep your Shoes On?)

This was the first presentation I attended on Friday and I immediately knew it was going to be a good one when I heard Dr. Dre bumping in the conference room. The presentation was given by Luke Wyckoff, the Chief Visionary Officer for Social Media Energy based out of Colorado. After introducing himself and trying to get an understanding of who was on what social media platforms, he gave us a quick task to complete. The task he gave us was to look at someone in the room that we have never seen before in our lives and draw a picture of their face. As someone who is lacking in the artistic department the person I drew a picture of didn't come out so flattering, as you can see below. Lucky for me though I had two people elect to draw me and their pictures came out a lot better then mine. The point he was trying to make with this is that too many millennials don't take ownership for the their self-image and too often allow people to define them.

Luke then went on to describe how he got into the social media business explaining how he was at a meeting with heads of a company and while he was showing them his various social media profiles they all agreed that he should do that for them. He was appalled that they would be willing to pay to outsource their social media for their company. So much so that he decided to keep upping his price when pitching this concept to other companies until he got to a company that wouldn't say yes too quickly, exclaiming that he had found his business strategy. He explained that our generation has tremendous value over the previous generations due to all of us knowing how to use social media to promote our brands and that we should be using this to our advantage as we look to start our careers in marketing.

He then started to dive into giving all of us advice for our plans for after college and how to decide what job would be right for us. He asked the room what we would prefer as far as a job in the future, one that pays more money or one that allows you to have more freedom with your time. He told us that he's found that most of our generation would rather have more freedom with our time then be payed more and that if you worked for him all that would matter is that your job gets done on time and perfectly. Luke then asked if we wanted to make a bet with him where if we got A's on all of our written assignments for the rest of our college careers then all our debt would be paid for but anything less then an A, you get kicked out. Anyone who was willing to take the bet was exactly the kind of person he wants working for him. He went on to relate this to a story of someone who worked for him that had used the wrong variation of there, their, and they're on a company's site. The company fired his company and that person who screwed up was also subsequently fired. The point he was trying to make is that it might not be the most uptight workplace but perfection is demanded.

He reiterated how important social media is, especially LinkedIn and that it should be what we are most active on out of all the platforms. Luke Stressed that social profiling is the norm nowadays and it's most likely the first thing they look to before dismissing you from their job. He also suggested that we keep a chart in the back of our minds while interviewing too, one with three columns that include things I love to do, things I'm good at, and things I can't stand. The purpose of this chart is to know what you want out of a work environment and to ensure that you'll be happy working there. The last thing I took away from the presentations is that true happiness is waking up every Monday morning and thinking, I can't believe that I'm getting paid for this and I couldn't agree more.