Girls In Tech

During this high-level event, top Publishers, Agency Executives and Brand Marketers will come together to discuss how Social Media is everywhere and is changing everything.

–>DIGIDAY gives media and marketing leaders a chance to converge and reveal high-level success strategies as well as offer insights on how the future of Social Media Marketing will play out for all.

–>Leading Women Include: Cynthia Neiman, Vice President of Mattel Digital Network, Mattel, Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager, Windows Digital Marketing, Microsoft, Tameka Kee, editorial director, DIGIDAY, Sarah Hofstetter, Senior Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i, and many more!

–> We’re partnering with digiday: Social on this event, so Girls in Tech LA Members Save $100 off the registration price. Use this code for your discount: GITDS. Register at https://registration.dm2events.com/event/socialla/.

You are cordially invited to join Girls in Tech LA & Women in Technology International for this year’s spring mixer. Network with old friends, make new contacts and connect with WITI and GIT LA members. This year’s event will be held at the gorgeous Wokcano  Restaurant in Santa Monica, and tickets will sell out fast.

Get a $20 discount on tickets with the code GITLA. Hope to see everyone there!

Since its launch in February, Google Buzz has dominated headlines from the blogosphere to the twittersphere, and every social media sphere in between. From people decrying it as yet another nail in the coffin of personal privacy to people applauding it as a bold step forward for communication and collaboration, Buzz has certainly lived up to its name – at least in terms of all the attention its gotten in the past month.

So what is Buzz? Well, according to Google itself “Google Buzz lets you share updates, photos, links, and pretty much anything else you’d like with your Gmail contacts; it’s an easy way to follow your friends, too. When you click Buzz in your Gmail account, you’ll see the stream of posts from people you’re following, and a box for you to post your updates.” So basically, Buzz is a way for you to post items that are shared with your Gmail contacts, and people who follow you on the service. Sort of like a Facebook status update for your Gmail.

Of course, like any good web product, there’s a lot more to it than just the elevator pitch. Buzz is already proving to be a valuable tool for soliciting feedback on a project, gathering opinions on a popular topic and finding targeted information that’s relevant to you. Which, of course, makes it a social media marketer’s wet dream, and has advertisers salivating over the possibility that Google may now have yet another place to distribute its patented brand of extremely targeted ads.

But, if you’re not looking to solicit feedback from your friends or sell something to your followers, why should you use Buzz? Well, the answer lies in that whole targeted information thing. That’s right, Buzz is yet another stream of information you can tap into to find out what’s trending and what your friends are talking about. But, because it maps back to your Gmail contacts, the theory is that it’s even more targeted than Twitter, more focused than Facebook and more interesting than random RSS feeds. The idea is that if you’re subscribing to people you already communicate with regularly via email, you will be more interested in what those people have to say than what Followed #4,238 on Twitter is talking about. And, of course, there are all those nifty Google algorithms to help really steer your Buzz stream.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and I have to say my feelings are mixed. Mostly because I haven’t yet been able to really slot Buzz into my daily social media habits. Between Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Reddit, Delicious, Stumble and the occasional email update from my mom, I’m pretty well situated when it comes to keeping abreast of the news and information I care about. So far, Buzz hasn’t yet evolved from a fun distraction into a daily information addiction the way those other services have. That said, now that there’s a Buzz iPhone app, I might finally be able to find a way to fit that fun new distraction into my daily routine. If only so I can make more “I just got so buzzed” puns on Twitter.

This press release comes directly from Crisis Commons, who are doing such great work that we wanted to share them with all of our Girls in Tech. To learn more, or get involved, check out their site and follow them on Twitter.

Hundreds of CrisisCamp volunteers are gathering in an expanded number of cities to collaborate on information technology projects in support of disaster relief for post-earthquake Haiti. Initially launched last week in six locations in response to the crisis, the volunteer technology effort has rapidly grown to 12 cities in four countries.

CrisisCamps are in-person meetings of a new grassroots movement called CrisisCommons (http://www.crisiscommons.org), with a mission to share best practices for crisis response.

Montreal and Toronto in Canada,  as well as Bogota, Colombia, join London, UK as international locations. US gatherings will take place in: Boston; Denver; Los Angeles; Miami; New Orleans; Portland; Seattle; Sunnyvale, California; and Washington, D.C.

In just one week, CrisisCamp Haiti volunteers in five cities collaboratively conceived of and created “We Have, We Need” (http://www.wehaveweneed.org/) an online service to support the logistics of matching donors and relief organizations. CrisisCampers have also assisted organizations such as Ushahidi, Sahana and OpenStreetMap to generate free detailed basemap information for Haiti. The detailed digital maps have been useful to rescue teams by locating NGOs on the ground, source of available water and the locations of evacuee camps. Additionally, volunteers built and contributed data to mobile phone applications to allow those on the ground to report vital information such as the location of hospitals or missing persons. Nontechnical volunteers have been instrumental as well, as with one project requested by the United Nations that generated a definitive list of news sources covering the Haiti earthquake.

Development on these projects has continued even after CrisisCamp events are over through open source online collaborative tools, such as MediaWiki, Drupal and Internet Relay Chat. Projects underway include Language & Translation, Mobile Disaster Assessment Mapping, Family Reunification and Haitian Skilled Worker Retention. CrisisCamp creations are released under a free license, allowing anyone to use, copy or modify any volunteer efforts.

All of the applications and project descriptions can be found on the CrisisCommons website. Listed on the site are “Simple Tasks Anyone Can Do” with screencasts and step-by-step instructions to teach the Internet novice how they can participate.

“We are witnessing the development of a transformational change in how an average citizen can participate in the crisis response effort,” says CrisisCommons co-founder Noel Dickover.  “Previously you could only send money.  Now, you can directly help in the response. An existing social network of national and international first responders, web 2.0 developers, and NGOs had been established, so the immediate response was just a matter of galvanizing existing relationships.”

About CrisisCamp
CrisisCamp is a open, collaborative event held in “barcamp” style to provide local and international responders, community leaders of affected areas and non-governmental organizations an opportunity to engage with operations on the ground during a crisis. Tools and resources created by CrisisCamp volunteers are designed to enhance responders’ decision-making capability, transparency and collaboration.

About CrisisCommons
CrisisCommons brings together domain experts, developers, and first responders to develop technology and practices for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief. CrisisCommons is part of a global movement that unites volunteers, academia, non-profits, companies and government officials in sharing best practices and lessons learned to advocate for further use of technology and telecommunications to assist citizens and communities during crisis.

Founded in March 2009 through an impromptu meetup of Twitter users at the Government 2.0 Camp, a small band of idealists and innovators gathered to discuss the idea of a creating a common community through a mash-up of citizen volunteers, crisis response organizations, international humanitarian relief agencies, non-profits and the private sector. Within minutes, the CrisisCamp concept was born to unite communities, seek common ground and cultivate innovation in the use of technology for mobility and efficiency during crisis.

Learn more about the movement at http://www.crisiscommons.org/

As women in a mostly male-dominated field, it’s easy to have a tenuous relationship with the idea of ‘beauty.’ After all, we want people to focus on the skills and savvy we bring to the table, and not necessarily on the brand of purse we put down on top of it. If you’re a female who deals regularly with developers, this balancing act can be even more precarious. How do you justify spending time on hair and makeup when most of the men you’re working with would rather worry about HTML than hygiene?

But, it’s hard to ignore the effect your appearance has on your confidence. And, any successful woman – or man for that matter – will tell you that confidence is a key component of that success. So, many of us still take the time to do our hair. To put on a little makeup. To pick out that perfect outfit. It doesn’t make us any less skilled or savvy, it just makes us feel a little better as we go about our daily business. What we don’t realize is how lucky we are to be able to do that for ourselves. And, that’s where GlamourGals comes in.

GlamourGals is an organization that arranges makeovers and beauty treatments for women in nursing homes. By hooking young women up with their elderly counterparts, the organization provides both parties with opportunities to foster meaningful relationships, and also helps those elderly women to get that same little beauty boost we all know and love. It also has an amazing social media component, in its use of a proprietary networking site for all of its chapters, which helps the organization keep infrastructure costs low and connectivity high. Started in 2000, GlamourGals is now having its tenth birthday party in LA, giving glamorous gals across the LA area the chance to celebrate and support this very worthy cause.

The party is at Bimi Restaurant, on February 25. There will be complementary cocktails, raffle prizes, food and gift bags, and the whole thing kicks off at 6pm. Hosts include Lauren Berger and Laurel Kaufman of our very own GIT LA chapter, and Girls in Tech members get $10 off ticket prices through the first week of February. So, break out your best beauty products and start primping – this is one event worth getting all dolled up for.

What: GlamourGals 10th Birthday Party

Where: Bimi Restaurant, 11917 Wilshire Blvd

When: Feb 25, 2010 (6-9pm)

Register Here

The semantic web — if that phrase doesn’t mean anything to you yet, don’t worry. Pretty soon it will be as commonplace as its close cousin – the ’social web.’ It’s basically a fancy term for the idea of linking all the web’s data to create all kinds of relationships between people, products, sites and more. At its most basic level, it means creating a common language to allow all the individual elements of the internet to communicate and connect. By also making that language more human meaningful, developers can use semantic web principles to put out applications that are better able to comprehend and complement the core structures of our society.

Have you ever used Facebook Connect? Searched for something on Google? Bought a product through an Amazon affiliate link? Any time you do any of these things — and countless more on the big ol’ interwebs — you’re reaping the benefits of the semantic web.  In fact, some of the most exciting and innovative stuff happening on today’s internet is based on this concept. Which is why it’s fitting that for many people, ’semantic web’ is becoming synonymous with ‘Web 3.0.’

Want to learn more? Check out Mediabistro’s Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara next week. With speakers like Microsoft’s Mark Johnson and Scott Prevost, Google’s Johanna Wright and Vulcan Inc.’s Mark Greaves, the conference is already shaping up to be a great resource for anyone interested in learning more about the next big movement on the web. Plus, GIT members will save 20% on tickets with code: W3GIT.

What: Mediabistro’s Web 3.0 Conference

Where: Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway,
Santa Clara, California, USA 95054

When: January 26-27, 2010

Register

So, you’re looking for a social media job. You want to be a content coordinator, a social media marketer, an editorial executive, whatever. You’ve polished up your resume, rounded up your references and picked up the perfect pair of interview shoes. You email every job post on the web. And then you wait. And wait. And wait. And meanwhile, I’m sitting at my desk, sifting through resumes and wondering why we can’t find anyone halfway decent for social media openings at our company.

So why aren’t you interviewing with me? Well, assuming you’re a qualified candidate, then the problem is probably your cover letter.

You see, your cover letter is a lot more than a simple intro for your resume and references. It’s a first impression of your qualifications. And, in many cases, it’s the only impression that busy person on the other side of the screen is going to get before they decide to dismiss you completely.

So, how do compose a killer cover letter? Simple. Just follow the three P’s. Personality, profiles and proofreading.

Personality is probably the trickiest of the trifecta. Social media certainly ain’t a 9-5 gig, so when I’m screening resumes, I’m always aware that I’ll probably end up spending more time with the person we pick than I do with my friends and family combined. A little personality in your cover letter is a great barometer for me when making those decisions. But, show too much personality, and you might come across as unprofessional. So, I’ll gladly read colloquialisms, creativity and even the occasional quip. Emoticons and excessive exclamation on the other hand will probably get a less positive response.  And don’t forget, one person’s treasured triple-exclamation-point sign off might just be another one’s personal pet peeve. (Hint, hint).

If you’re applying for a job in social media, the profiles part should be the easiest part of this equation. Just make sure you include links to all of your social media sites. And you might as well include the personal and professional. Don’t think I’m not gonna google it if you don’t. When we’re hiring for a heavy social media job, we want to see people with a presence on the social web. So,I’m looking at your ratio of Twitter followers to followers, your number of tweets, your social aggregator accounts, your blog, your boyfriend’s blog — whatever I can find to prove that you know your way around the web. You don’t need to have your fingers in every profile pie, but you should have some background in this whole social networking scene. If you don’t, then you better have a backup plan for proving to me that you’re the person for the post.

Last, but not least, make sure you proofread. If I had a nickel for every typo, grammar gaffe, misused word or spelling mistake I’ve seen in cover letters over the past year, I could probably afford to just fund the invention of a robot who would cover all of our open job posts, so I’d never again have to stare in disbelief at the cover letter of a college graduate who can’t tell the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there.’ Seriously, I can’t stress the importance of proofreading your cover letters enough. This is also true for emails sent from mobile devices. If it’s the first piece of writing I’m going to be seeing from you, it’s worth a few extra minutes of meticulousness.

At the end of the day, crafting a killer cover letter comes down to this: you could have the best background of anybody on the web, but if your cover letter is awful, it’s like hiding a gorgeous gown under a crappy coat. What’s the point? If you’re going to invest in the gown, make sure you spend some time on the outerwear too. After all, it’s the first layer of your first impression. And, the first step towards scoring a chance to show off those interview shoes.

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday about the changes being made to Facebook’s privacy structure, it looks like #privacy is about to have yet another run as the trending topic du jour. Well, that and that couple that crashed the White House dinner — as Demetri Martin would say, they’re like the herpes of hyped up news stories. Scheming social climbers aside, privacy is one of the web’s biggest concerns. As girls in tech, we talk about it all the time. Are our identities safe? Are our personal and professional brands secure? Are the kids in our lives making smart choices when they surf?

Months worth of memes have been made out of relatively minor changes to Facebook’s privacy policies in the past, and the comments are already piling in to the Mashable Article discussing this most recent development. It’s easy to understand why people get so worked up over what happens to their information on the internet. From cookies that track our every click to the fact that between docs, mail, maps and search, google knows more about you than your parents probably do, it’s clear that there’s plenty of reasons to make even the sanest surfer paranoid about what they post. As the product manager at a growing user generated content site, I deal with difficult decisions having to do with privacy all the time. What our decision making process always comes back to is a simple question: what would we want someone else to be doing with our data? Nine times out of ten, the answer is simple: give the user as much control over their content as you can.

Of course, as a user, it’s up to you to take advantage of that control. Fortunately, there are as many tools to track the people tracking you as there are mistresses in Tiger Woods’ skeleton closet. There’s google privacy dashboard, which allows you to see all the data points that google’s got about you. You can also set up a google alert that will let you know when new content about you is indexed by the search engine’s spiders. Keotag lets you put in a key word, and see what people are saying about it everywhere from Technorati to Twitter. And, Boardtracker lets you do the same sort of thing across multiple comment boards. Which means you can post your complaints about the new Facebook privacy policy today, and see all the trolls’ responses tomorrow.

It ain’t exactly privacy per se, but it’s pretty powerful stuff nonetheless.  At the end of the day, I strongly believe that the best privacy policy on the web is still the one you set up for yourself by watching what you post, where you post it and what gets said about it after you leave. However, if that’s too complicated for you, then just remember this simple rule: if you’re going to crash a White House dinner, don’t post photos of your uninvited self shaking hands with the president on Facebook. Unless, of course, your personal privacy policy involves a camera crew from Bravo and a hefty chunk of reality show change. In which case, I’ll see you on Thursdays at 10 in my living room.

We’ve come a long way since the days of web 1.0 – we’ve gone from Geocities to geotagging, dial up to DSL, talking to Tweeting. Where once there was only C++ and HTML, wikipedia now lists an entire alphabet of programming languages. Where once there was only static content, we now expect our websites to be so dynamic that they update in real time. Remember the guestbook? Or, how about the days when browsing the web meant Netscape, searching the web meant Yahoo! and connecting to the web at all meant hours of sitting in front of your desk listening to your modem screech?

Well Toto, we’re definitely not in web 1.0 anymore. Every day we move towards a more mobile, open and dynamic internet – a trend that some people are already calling Web 3.0. Every day, the web gets faster, smarter and more semantic. Every day, sites connect more, open up more, and share more. And every day, the internet becomes more and more indispensable in our daily lives. And whether you’re one of the people touting this trend, or one of the people worried that all this data sharing really just signals the decline of western civilization as we know it, you have to admit, it’s pretty stunning to look back and realize how far we’ve come on the web in the past decade.

Wherever the web goes next, there is a lot of power in knowing where it came from. And that’s the beauty of Digital Family Reunion. For one night, they get all the best early adopters and power players of the web 1.0 world into a room with the up and comers of web 2.0 (and now, even web 3.0), from the venture capitalists to the software developers, and everyone in between. It’s a great opportunity for networking and knowledge building, not to mention a killer atmosphere for a party. And, since GIT LA is an affiliate organization, our members get $20 off tickets too. How’s that for a little holiday love from the family?

What: Digital Family Reunion 2009

Where: Wokcano in Santa Monica

When: December 2, 6-11pm

How: Enter Promo Code DFR09  when you buy tickets here.

It’s easy to dismiss anything with the words ‘good’ and ‘green’ in it as just another lame attempt to jump on the post “Inconvenient Truth” bandwagon. You know which bandwagon I’m referring to — the one that runs on ethanol, with the solar powered electric system and the big bumper sticker proclaiming the number of carbon offsets the driver purchased.

But, before you go and get all cynical on the whole sustainability thing, consider this: environmental consciousness isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for the green too. And by green, I mean money. In a Thomson Reuters study last year, 82% of investors said they consider environmental and social criteria when making decisions.  And, in just this one BusinessWeek article, there are five examples of corporations from every sector of the economy who saved significant money by ‘greening’ their operations.

This can be especially true for tech and social media, where the consumer is king and an increasingly conscientious customer base is demanding more social and environmental accountability from their favorite brands every day. In September, Apple even started releasing data about its corporate environmental footprint, a move that helped boost its branding as the go-to gadget maker for conscientious consumers.

And, when it comes to social consciousness through tech consumerism, it’s not just about gadgets and green. From Mashable’s Summer of Social Good to Twestival, the social media scene is getting a whole lot more socially conscious too, resulting in the growth of what the blogosphere likes to call the ’social good’ movement. Whether it’s raising money, raising awareness or raising environmental accountability standards, the tech industry is certainly climbing atop that big, green bandwagon in full force. Now, the question is what impact that trend will have on the tech industry and on both the good and green movements it’s embracing. Not to mention how we as girls in tech and as tech businesspeople in general can do some good and make some green in the process — both kinds.

That’s why Girls in Tech LA is proud to present The Impact of Tech On Good & Green — a panel discussion featuring Sandra Sanchez (Creator of orGlamic.com & reality TV host/producer), Sarah Townsend (Editorial Director of Socialvibe.com & Creator of theoneinpink.com) and Tracy Helper (Co-founder of Yourdailythread.com). These amazing women will be discussing social good, sustainability, green gadgets and more at The Organic Panificio restaurant in Marina Del Rey on November 17. Of course, there will also be time for cocktails and conversation as well. And, a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will go to Free Arts For Abused Kids — an incredible organization that provides at risk kids with counseling and support through art.  Because what’s more in keeping with the theme of ’social good’ than sharing good conversation and good drinks for a good cause?

What: GIT LA Presents The Impact of Tech on Good  & Green

Where: The Organic Panaficio in Marina Del Rey

When: Nov 17, 7-10pm

RSVP & Buy Tickets