At kids soccer games around the country, hyperconnected Dads tweet about trivia to pass the time. Meanwhile, as you walk into a supposedly social event, people all around you pull out their devices to "check in" on Foursquare or Gowalla. Through the night, people continue sharing their real feelings and thoughts not with the person in front of them but to their audience of "followers" on Twitter, making a real life social event feel decidedly ANTI-social. Sound familiar? As technology allows us to share every moment instantaneously online, are we missing out on what is right in front us? And if so, is the only solution to turn our gadgets off, or is there some imaginary line of balance that we can strike? This session will explore those questions, and the anti-social path that our always-connectedness may be leading us towards. Most importantly, we’ll try to uncover how you might fight back and reclaim your humanity from the social media bubble around you.
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.
Mark DiMassimo is CEO and Chief Creative Officer of DIGO Brands, a brand driven growth network he founded in 1996.
DIGO Brands is, in effect, a total growth department, allowing CEOs and other top-level managers at ambitious mid-sized organizations to pull all the levers of growth simultaneously, from product innovation to every facet of promotion. DIGO provides a total growth partner that is driven, market-tested and growth-trained over the past two decades by partnering on many of the legendary brand and business growth stories of our time, including Comcast, Crunch, Citi, McKinsey, thinkorswim, Gateway, MasterCard, and many more. DIGO Brands makes things grow.
DiMassimo is also co-founder of Offlining, a movement whose mission is helping people to reestablish islands of offline life in an increasingly device-mediated world. Offlining uses branding, advertising, innovative product development, social marketing, community building and storytelling to "sell the Off Button."
DiMassimo and his Offlining Co-Founder, Eric Yaverbaum, previously co-founded Tappening, which promotes healthy and economical tap water and which has been credited with helping to reverse a two-decades-long upward trend in bottled water sales. He serves on the board of Rare Conservation, and on both the Advisory Board and Creative Review Committee of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. DiMassimo is featured in the best-selling Leadership Secrets of the World’s Most Successful CEOs. A familiar face on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and Fox, DiMassimo is often quoted in the media.
Mark lives in Rye, New York and is the happy husband of Jill and the devoted father of three boys.
Rohit is a founding member of the 360 Digital Influence group at Ogilvy where he has led marketing strategy for clients including Intel, Pepsi, Lenovo, Seiko, Unilever, and dozens of others. He is the author of the best selling book Personality Not Included, an actually useful (gasp!) guide on how to use personality to reinvent your marketing which is available in over 50 countries in 8 different languages. He has written over 900 pieces of marketing advice on his personal blog Influential Marketing and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, NPR and other impressive places. Rohit teaches marketing at Georgetown University and is proud of his reputation as a fun and "non-obvious" keynote speaker who has presented across the world on authenticity, creativity, storytelling, social media, and why marketing is no longer like feeding a baby.
