Episode 97: Social Media Day Detroit, SMAMi, Engineering Society of Detroit, MITechNews.com and More

Episode 97 saw us joined by Sola Obayan of SMAMi.org to talk Social Media Day Detroit, Matt Roush to talk about the Engineering Society of Detroit and his own Tech Century tech blog, and Mike Brennan to talk about the latest goings on with MITechNews, and a whole lot more. From cyber-bullying to social media best practices, this episode was a ton of fun…

As always, things kicked off with our take on the news, stories and events that caught our eye over the past week. We also took care of some of our own business as we chatted about our event last week at Blackfinn in Royal Oak and our event next week at the Whisky Bar downtown. Then we dove in to talk about Pixar’s latest film “Inside Out” and our conflicting takes on it, the suck that is QR codes and the harsh lesson that Heinz learned about using them in conjunction with domains that you forget to renew and get snatched up by people who don’t exactly have your company’s best interests at heart, AT&T getting slapped with an enormous fine over bandwidth throttling, a fake Facebook post that led to hundreds of people gathering at a church in Flint thinking they were there to find out about jobs at GM…but no such luck…and even more.

We came back with segment two to talk with Matt Roush and Mike Brennan, two guys with a lot of history as journalists here in the area and elsewhere. Mike runs MITechNews.com, our content partner behind the “News” tab up above and the “breaking news” widget in the right rail. Matt’s the Director of Communications and Public Relations for the Engineering Society of Detroit, but we’ve known him since his days of working at Crain’s and then from the Great Lakes IT Report (GLITR) that showed up in our inbox for the longest time with news and information we paid attention to. They’ve got some great perspectives on things here in the area, including the new Maker-based economy, 3d printing, tech in general and tons more. It was great having them in, and we’re looking forward to helping them launch their own show in the near future.

For segment three, we dove in with Sola Obayan from SMAMi.org, the Social Media Association of Michigan, to talk about this Friday’s Social Media Day Detroit event. There’s a VIP reception. There are some great speakers. There will be a ton of people in attendance that you want to meet and chat with. Best of all, the main session from 7-10 is completely free of charge, and it’s the one place in the planet where having a conversation while staring at your phone is not only tolerated, but expected. Tickets are still available for the VIP reception portion of the evening as well…and rumor has it we’ll be doing a live broadcast from the event with whatever guests we can collar as they walk by, so we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

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Our fourth segment doubled back on a topic that we started getting into during our third segment but wanted to break to give it enough time for an actual talk about it – cyber bullying. What it means in the world today, and why it’s different than when those of us around the table were growing up.

Then a little sappy sentimentality since it was Bob’s anniversary, and his wife actually sat in with us for the night to hang and have some fun.