This week, Ketchum is hosting its second annual “Respect the Internet” event. It’s an opportunity for some of the leading voices and influencers on the Internet to come together with some of the best and brightest in marketing to discuss trends and ways we can all work together that better contributes to the wealth of Internet culture.
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be moderating two incredible panels.
The first is called Brands as Creators and the panelists include Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner Cable; Erik Martin, General Manager, Reddit; and Rob Beschizza, Managing Editor, Boing Boing.
The goal of the panel is to discuss why brands need to create compelling content to maintain relevance, leadership and awareness amongst their core audiences. More importantly, we’ll explore how that content will be created—whether it’s through crowd-sourcing, partnering with interesting blogs or creating it from scratch. And, we’ll explore whether or not brands may be creating too much content, some of which is just for the sake of creating something.
The second panel is called Connectivity vs. Anonymity. Google+ made news during launch when it refused to let Lady Gaga, amongst other celebrities, use their “stage” names in their profiles. It’s an ongoing debate on the Internet — should we all use our real names or does anonymity enable the way to true honesty when saying something on the Internet? We’ll feature a discussion between two social media experts on completely opposite sides of the spectrum and I couldn’t be more excited.
If you’re interested in attending, you can register here. If you can’t join us in person, I hope you’ll consider streaming some or all of our panels online — if you do, make sure you send us some tweets with the hashtag #RTI2011 or direct at our moderators and panels.
