Christopher Burgess’s presentation at SMC Seattle’s June event wasn’t just a wake-up call. It was a grab-and-shake-you-silly, ring-all-the-alarm-bells, freak-you-out-in-a-good-way kind of wake-up call.

The Senior Security Officer at Cisco Systems shared his cautionary tales and pointed advice about social media and internet security to a sold-out crowd at 415Westlake as they listened, tweeted, and raised their hands in response to his engaging questions throughout the night.

Among his questions:

After he highlighted the tremendous growth of social media via some striking statistics (e.g., “91% of all consumer internet traffic will be video in 2013″), Burgess stressed that our increasingly interconnected world demands a smart, common sense approach from each of us.

We own our words, which means we must also be aware of the permanent imprint they make.

“Once it is on the net, it is there forever,” Burgess cautioned. “There are no do-overs.”

As individuals and company representatives, we need to implement strategies and structures around our social media efforts, or be open to the troubling consequences that could follow, which include: identity theft, intellectual property violations, stalking, and physical harm.

Proving that he that he is walking the talk, Burgess provided the crowd with a link to Cisco’s social media handbook. These dangers are not just urban legends, said Burgess, as he recalled the story of a man who, after tweeting about his upcoming 10-day cruise, came back to an empty house.

Whenever you broadcast anything online, you should “talk about where you’ve been, not where you’re going.”

As for other “tweetable moments”, Burgess offered the following nuggets, ranging from fascinating to frightening to funny:

From my back row view, Burgess’s presentation felt like an impassioned and animated plea to think more seriously about our own online privacy and safety, and then act on it. Today.

Which reminds me… I’d better go do some password-smithing.

p.s. Let’s keep the conversation rolling! What questions did Christopher Burgess leave you with? Add a comment below or on Twitter: @burgessct & @SMCSeattle

p.p.s. Congratulations to Shauna Causey, SMC Seattle’s new VP!

Thank you to our sponsors: CBS Radio and Tungle.me!

CBS Radio, Seattle (comprised by KZOK.FM, KMPS.FM, JACK.FM, and AM1090) recognizes and embraces the digital evolution of our media.  Locally and nationally, their network employs a progressive perspective on multi-media stratagems and 360 solutions.  Social media rests at the epicenter of our digital focus.  Listeners are encouraged to blog, tweet, and facebook with his/her favorite on-air personalities, upload audio/visual content, share music, and much more. Follow them on Twitter: @1025KZOK and @941KMPS

Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones.  Tungle.me is a free personal scheduling application that eliminates costly double bookings, time zone mishaps, and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.  Tungle.me synchronizes with leading online calendar systems and does not require registration. Follow them on Twitter: @TungleRocks

Christopher Burgess, Senior Security Advisor

Christopher Burgess has been studying security and its role in social media as part of his job as Senior Security Advisor to Cisco.  He says he became interested in the topic when he saw how criminals were using the online environment to their advantage.

“If businesses and individuals understand how their information may be used by an individual with malevolent intent, they can appropriately adjust,“ says Burgess.  ”I help with the understanding. It is one of the reasons I volunteered for, and am a member of the Washington State Attorney General’s Internet Safety Taskforce.

Burgess will be speaking on how businesses and teams can create policies that minimize risk to their company while making sure they are asking the right questions of their IT team. He will offer tips, best practices and case studies.  If you are a business owner, marketer, PR consultant, or brand manager, you won’t want to miss this presentation. We are anticipating another sold-out event, so be sure to register soon!

Before his talk we caught up with Burgess to ask him a few questions.

What are the biggest security threats posed by social media to businesses?

I’ll share two which are top of my mind for me at this time, but do understand, as we move forward on the timeline and new methodologies evolve so do new threats.

1. Not having a social media handbook or guide which educates your employees on how social media is to be used in support of the business internally and externally
2. Data migration to uncontrolled environments

You mention that writing a company social media handbook is a good thing to do but many company handbooks regarding social media seem to crack down on employee use and completely ignore the possible benefits of having your employees talk about your company. How do you strike a balance?

Hopefully there are far fewer iterations of a policy or handbook which lockdown their employees, and more which are created to guide their employees in the use of social media tools both internal and external to the company. Without such the business leaves to interpretation as to how to triage situations and define what and how the company prefers the tools to be used. I think most of us prefer to remove ambiguity and provide our employees with direction and resources to make good decisions.

When did you first realize that company security was at risk because of employee use of social media?

A great question. Risk is a broadly defined word which can be quantified and defined in a variety of ways.

So let me give you two examples and I’ll hit on these and a few more during the presentation.

The first I’ll take right out chapter one of my book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost.” The “The Tale of the Targeted Trojan” discusses a case which demonstrated how the confluence of physical and technical surveillance conducted by those with criminal intent allowed for the creation of a one-off piece of malware which was specifically designed to extract competitive data from an unsuspecting business and did so across a number of international borders. The surveillance included the mining and observation of the information the unsuspecting business and their employees had placed online and thus was available for harvest. A number of companies were successfully targeted and lost a host of information. The different types of information included intellectual property, go to market plans, customer data, personnel data, etc.

The second has to do with taking internal data and exposing it externally. Specifically, I witnessed, from afar, a company in the healthcare industry take their internal coordination of their patient records and services and organically migrate the coordination to a convenient external environment which gave them connectivity in such a way that their internal infrastructure did not. Unfortunately, the external environment wasn’t designed with the level of security required by regulatory directive.

What different security issues do small companies face compared to large ones?

Small companies by definition have more limited resources than larger ones and thus don’t readily have the infrastructure or head-count to throw at the issue, but other than the resource difference, the issues are identical. They still have their data, their customer data, their intellectual property and trade secrets and their brand to protect, the differences is scale.

Are there technical security issues business owners and managers should be discussing with their IT team?

Absolutely. Both large and small companies should be discussing how a given technological implementation meets the business needs, while also conforming with the company’s information security policies and regulatory guidelines. Lets return to my prior example of the company which had an organic migration to a third-party environment for the purposes of doing their job in a more collaborative and coordinated manner. It would appear the intent was noble, but it also appears that the security and privacy regime surrounding that environment were not fully understood. It is this understanding that I believe are amongst the most important to be discussing with those providing IT.

Why should people come see you speak? — Why is your talk so important?

Those who are able to attend should take away a perspective and context which they may not have given much thought too previously. There is no turning back time nor the tide, the evolution of social media is continuing, and we are all participants, keeping our businesses, ourselves and our families safe and secure is what this talk is about – that’s important.

Any last thoughts?

I do enjoy sharing information and am very much looking forward to the event on the 29th of June when I will be amongst my friends, family, and colleagues within the Social Media Club of Seattle, a club which I am a member. I hope this is just the beginning of this conversation.

See Christopher Burgess at our June Event:

Date – June 29, 2010
Time – 6-9 p.m.
Tickets – $15 includes two drinks and appetizers
Location – 415 Westlake – 415 Westlake Ave. N. Seattle, Washington  98109
Register Now - http://smcseajune.eventbrite.com/

(Complimentary on-site parking available)

Thank you to sponsors CBS Radio Seattle and Tungle.me

More About Christopher Burgess:

Christopher Burgess is a senior security advisor to the chief security officer of Cisco, where he focuses on intellectual property strategies. Additionally, Christopher leads the Global Investigative Support team, the Government Security Office, and the Global Threat Analysis team. Burgess co-authored the book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, Preventing Intellectual Property Theft and Economic Espionage in the 21st Century” (Syngress, March 2008). In December 2009, The Huffington Post published his piece “A Common Sense Approach to Social Media.” Follow Christopher Burgess on Twitter: @burgessct and Cisco: http://twitter.com/CiscoSystems

SMCSeattle was a partner at the Online Marketing Summit this week.

As a member of SMCSeattle, I was clearly one of the few people who had a good pulse on the Social Media side. Considering that most people there were clearly going to be marketers, I was curious to see how they view the intersection of Social Media with Search marketing (SEO and SEM).
On the whole, it is great news for the Social Media community.
Social media is going to play a bigger and bigger role in search and marketing in the coming years. The best way to stay ahead and be the best marketer is to play and learn on the Social Media front. Embrace technology. Laggards in technology will always be laggards in marketing.

The opening Keynote with Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz and Mike Grehan of IncisiveMedia set the tone for the day.
They talked about Facebook, Twitter and Google and how search is shaping up beyond Google these days. Real time search is being redefined by location based applications such as OpenTable that tell you if a table is available at a restaurant close to your location RIGHT NOW. That is way different from, and more real time, than Google search, said Mike Grehan.

Rand Fishkin said they do not have enough data to say how exactly tweets are influencing real time search on Google, but the fact is that they(tweets) are and will influence search. Staying ahead matters, he said. So get on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare.

Each of the keynote speakers gave their four step marketing plan for any small business that wants to market without getting overwhelmed -

Rand Fishkin’s key points -
1. Start with Analytics – focus on measurements
2. Track your tweets, clicks on your links etc. using tools like bit.ly
3. Invest your time and marketing efforts on what you are most passionate about. If you are good at and feel strongly about Twitter and Facebook, start there. If you are an SEO person, first focus your efforts on SEO.
4. Give something away – something of value depending on what skill you have in house. White papers, infographics etc. always get a lot of hits and retweets, he said.
That should give you a good start. Keep measuring and slowly move to other areas and tools to market.

Mike Grehan had a 4P plan for businesses -
1. Positioning – First decide who you are. That is key to driving traffic.
2. Permission – Get the visitor’s permission to email them, add them to your lists etc. For this, you might need to give away something valuable.
3. Partnership – Do not try to go it alone. Marketing is so much more easy and effective if you co-promote, co-sponsor with other companies.
4. Performance – Now focus on doing better. Use tools such as email marketing, affiliates etc.
Measure everything. Analytics are key.

Another highlight of the day was a presentation by Jonathan Colman – Internet Marketing Manager at REI. I am including a link to that here. The presentation was packed with good information – so take your time to study it.

About: Maya Bisineer
twitter: @thinkmaya
Startup: Memetales – http://www.memetales.com
Blog: http://thinkmaya.com

Join us on June 29 as speaker Christopher Burgess offers his preferred practices and cautionary tales from his role as senior security advisor at Cisco.

When done right, says Burgess, social media allows you to engage in dynamic conversations with users, build brand equity, improve your solutions, and drive customers to purchase and adopt. But beware of the dark side, as employee behavior can cast a poor light on your company and put the integrity of your brand’s reputation, network, and IP at risk.

If you are a business owner, marketer, PR consultant, or brand manager, you won’t want to miss this presentation. We are anticipating another sold-out event, so be sure to register soon!

June event details:

Date – June 29, 2010
Time – 6-9 p.m.
Tickets – $15 includes two drinks and appetizers
Location – 415 Westlake – 415 Westlake Ave. N. Seattle, Washington  98109
Register Now – http://smcseajune.eventbrite.com/

(Complimentary on-site parking available)

About our speaker:

Christopher Burgess is a senior security advisor to the chief security officer of Cisco, where he focuses on intellectual property strategies. Additionally, Christopher leads the Global Investigative Support team, the Government Security Office, and the Global Threat Analysis team. Burgess co-authored the book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, Preventing Intellectual Property Theft and Economic Espionage in the 21st Century” (Syngress, March 2008). In December 2009, The Huffington Post published his piece “A Common Sense Approach to Social Media.” Follow Christopher Burgess on Twitter: @burgessct and Cisco: http://twitter.com/CiscoSystems

Thank you to our sponsors: CBS Radio and Tungle.me!

CBS Radio, Seattle (comprised by KZOK.FM, KMPS.FM, JACK.FM, and AM1090) recognizes and embraces the digital evolution of our media.  Locally and nationally, their network employs a progressive perspective on multi-media stratagems and 360 solutions.  Social media rests at the epicenter of our digital focus.  Listeners are encouraged to blog, tweet, and facebook with his/her favorite on-air personalities, upload audio/visual content, share music, and much more. Follow them on Twitter: @1025KZOK and @941KMPS

Tungle.me makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones.  Tungle.me is a free personal scheduling application that eliminates costly double bookings, time zone mishaps, and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.  Tungle.me synchronizes with leading online calendar systems and does not require registration. Follow them on Twitter: @TungleRocks

SMC Seattle May Event: How to Call BS on a Social Media Guru

In the world of Web 2.0, anyone can claim to be a social media guru. How do you differentiate between a scam artist and a sage? How do you separate the snake oil from the substance?

Please join us at Hale’s Palladium and Brewery on May 25 as writer, speaker and former Microsoft manager Scott Berkun leads us through this fun, witty, fast-paced and interactive look at the new world of social media. With Scott at the helm, we’ll take a critical look at gurus, both generally and within the social media space. We’ll ask the tough questions that need some clarification—what’s real, what’s not, and how you can tell the difference.

The main event will be held at Hale’s Palladium, a festival-themed warehouse in the back of the Hale’s Brewery. From the front door of the Brewery, just follow the yellow brick road around the building to the Palladium. After the main event we’ll make our way to the Brewery for an after-party.

Only 200 are tickets available. If you’d like to attend, we suggest you reserve a ticket soon since we expect to sell out quickly.

About Our Speaker:
Scott was a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including v1-5 (not 6) of Internet Explorer. He is the author of three bestselling books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation and Confessions of a Public Speaker. He works full time as a writer and speaker, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes magazine, The Economist, The Washington Post, Wired magazine, National Public Radio and other media. He regularly contributes to Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington, and has appeared as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. He writes frequently on innovation and creative thinking at his blog: scottberkun.com and tweets at @berkun.

A Big Thank You to Subway, This Month’s Sponsor!
Subway has a long history throughout Western Washington, and is excited to be sponsoring this month’s SMC Seattle event.  There are more than 360 Subway stores throughout the area– more than almost any other area in the country— which is a reflection of the healthy, active lifestyle of many Seattle residents. If you’re looking for a healthy on-the-go alternative to fast food, Subway offers eight different sandwiches; each with just six grams of fat or less. Subway’s Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich (Jared’s favorite) makes a great tasting, low-fat meal.

To stay up to date with Subway and it’s delicious offerings:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/subwayfreshbuzz
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/subway
http://www.subway.com/

May event details:
Date – May 25, 2010
Time – 6-9 p.m.
Tickets – $15 includes a drink and appetizers (cash bar will available)
Register – http://smcseamay.eventbrite.com/
Location – Hale’s Palladium (http://halesbrewery.com/Palladium.htm) – 4301 Leary Way NW, Seattle, WA 98107
Hale’s Brewery and Palladium is just north of downtown Seattle on Leary Way between the Fremont and Ballard neighborhoods.

Good luck on the million bucks part, but guess what: Twestival Seattle has the rest covered!

On Thursday, March 25th thousands of people in cities around the globe will gather face-to-face to use social media for social good at Twestival! All Twestival gatherings are volunteer-driven, and 100 percent of the event proceeds go directly to Concern Worldwide, an inspiring international humanitarian organization that works to make education more accessible for some of the world’s poorest children. For more information on the history and impact of Twestival, visit: http://twestival.com/

So, what about the flying part? We’re lucky enough to have Emerald City Trapeze in our ‘hood, and they’ve generously offered their space to be the official venue of Twestival! And, thanks to Spring Creek Group for sponsoring the “air time,” a few lucky attendees will get the opportunity to ‘fly high’ learning trapeze basics. There are 60 flying spots available and if you’re interested, please email ShaunaCausey-at-gmail-dot-com. If you’re one of the first 50 to respond, you’ll get a chance to take one or two swings, under the guidance of the talented Emerald City Trapeze instructors,of course. If you’re not interested in trying it out for yourself, don’t worry, there will be a professional flying show later in the evening so we can watch the best in the Northwest perform. Most creative Twestival venue ever? We think so! Follow @TwestivalSea for more unfolding updates.

Twestival Seattle Details
Date – Thursday, March 25
Location – Emerald City Trapeze (2702 6th Avenue South in SODO.)
Time – 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Donation Levels –

$30 early bird / $40 regular registration (up to 1 week prior to the event)
$50 bronze donor
$75 silver donor
$100 gold/corporate donor

RSVP here! http://bit.ly/twseattle

About Concern Worldwide (@Concern): Concern Worldwide was founded in 1968 to meet the needs of people living in extreme poverty. Concern is a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of poverty. Please follow @concern on Twitter to get a glimpse of their staff tweeting from around the world; including their efforts on the ground in Haiti.

A huge thanks to Swedish Medical Center (@Swedish) for being the PLATINUM Sponsor! Did you know Swedish is turning 100 this year? The original Swedish Hospital opened as a nonprofit in 1910 by Swedish immigrant and surgeon Dr. Nils Johanson. Today, Swedish is Greater Seattle’s largest nonprofit health system. They’re working to improve the health of the community in many ways, including using social media to raise awareness about health issues. Swedish Medical Center not only shares the same acronym as Social Media Club Seattle (we both go by SMC), they are also a big supporter of SMC Seattle and Twestival Seattle. Learn about contests and other fun surprises in store for their 100th birthday by following Swedish online:
@Swedish
Facebook.com/swedishbabies
Youtube.com/swedishseattle
Facebook.com/swedishmedicalcenter

If someone were to ask you what social media, CRM and online relationships would be like in ten years, how would you respond? How about five years? Well, at SMC Seattle’s February 2010 event, Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner, offered up a few predictions:

2011: More than 2 billion people will have gone online (some estimate more).

2015: 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.

2020: A city will elect an anonymous persona for mayor.

It’s not Personal, it’s Persona

The future of social media and customer relationship management (CRM) is built around anonymous virtual personas, says Sarner. So much so, that by 2020, that marketing and sales of products for virtual personas will outweigh traditional B2C spending. What will that future look like? Think fragmented. Whereas we currently see many social media professionals currently try to aggregate their profiles and keep a common persona, Sarner argues that the general population will have increasingly fragmented personas (ex: one for Second Life, one for parenting, one for Amazon, etc). He believes that companies will move more towards selling to the persona, rather than the person.

During his talk, Gartner’s director of research pointed out that the meritocratic atmosphere of the internet helps fuel an optimal environment to satisfy Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. As we continue to utilize the internet, Sarner believes it will be more and more important to seek self-actualization, and the beauty of the internet is that it can fulfill any human need from physiological (food, water, breathing) to self-actualization (creativity, problem solving, personal growth).

Sarner claims that we have gone from an era (Web 1.0) of fulfilling the most basic human needs (eCommerce) to an era (Web 2.0) of fulfilling our needs for esteem and belonging (personal/social voice – e.g. social media). He stated that we will not be able to complete the top of the Maslow pyramid (self-actualization) until we move to a more virtual world based entirely on personas.

The Personabot

As we move forward to fill these needs in the future, Sarner raised his most controversial prediction: the idea of “Personabots”, calling them “the killer application for Generation V[irtual]“. Personabots would work to fulfill some of the most basic physiological necessities, and human needs at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, while managing the most mundane social media tasks and the ever-increasing amounts of data that we’ll consume.

So what exactly is the Personabot?

“The Personabot is an automated, personality infused, self-learning, self-replicating, virtual representative that will be used as a tool for facilitating life events, from tactical to the strategic.”

-Adam Sarner

Got it? Well, imagine a world where you could set up a Personabot to set up bids for you on eBay based on your personal preferences and ideas. Imagine a world where your Personabot shops for what you need at the store automatically depending on a budget and your needs at home. Imagine a world where a Personabot goes to a hundred job interviews for you, and comes back to tell you which ones are the best fit for you.

These are all ideas in the realm of possibility for the Personabot, says Gartner’s director of research. In fact, during the Q&A afterwards, Chris Pirillo referenced a website that is already doing something similar to the idea of a Personabot called Alice; a service that manages the stock of products in your home so that you “never run out of toilet paper again”. Even still, a life ruled by sentient robots created by our preferences handling a multitude of our tasks seems far away.

Sarner answered a handful of thoughtful questions at the end of the talk, ranging from how the Personabot would truly work, to how people will be able to manage multiple virtual personas. Few topics are better at sparking provocative debate than bold predictions and prognostications of the future. This was no exception.

Only time will tell what the future will be like. At last night’s SMC Seattle event, Gartner’s Adam Sarner raised a number of bold possibilities and ideas. Though the social media world may never be like what Sarner describes, there are many aspects that we can analyze and embrace, and some probing questions we can ask ourselves about what lies ten years away. Just think: just ten years ago, the term “social media” didn’t even exist, and neither did Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. What do you think the future of social media and CRM holds ten years from now?

Jaremy Rich is the curator of Seattle [Startup Digest] and the creator of heart it hate it.

Thank you to all who came out and helped us celebrate our one-year anniversary at the Spitfire Grill. As usual, our members showed up in droves, and we were pleased to have some new faces join us, too.

“It was great to have a time to say thanks to the community that has supported us all year long,” said SMC Seattle President Kevin Urie. “They are an amazing group of people that I’m just glad to be a part of.”

The event was a smashing success, and we are so glad to have had your help in raising funds for the Jolkona Foundation and one of their projects to benefit the Technology Access Foundation (TAF). We hope the raffle winners enjoy the prizes that were donated (some pretty amazing stuff was given away)!

In the end, the event raised $2,650 to support Jolkona Foundation and one of their projects, Technology Access Foundation. The funds raised will provide 35 students with science, math, technology and engineering training through Technology Access Foundation (TAF). Stay tuned for a blog post in a month as we track how our funds are helping Jolkona and the students at TAF.

It’s hard to believe an entire year has passed, and yet when we reflect on all the relationships we’ve built, the time spent planning, the things we’ve learned – well, it’s been a pretty jam-packed twelve months. The key to everything, of course, is the community. It’s what “social media” is all about, right? Building relationships and communicating in an interactive fashion. This year has been about getting to know one another and reviewing the basics; this next year will be more about growth.

“The goal of SMC Seattle is to connect, educate and empower the Seattle social media community,” said Urie.  “We’ve seen some outstanding things happen this year in the community, but we look forward to providing a more educational atmosphere in 2010.”

Some of our goals include:
·         Up-leveling our content to reflect the growing sophistication of our members. Most have the social media concept down, and are looking for more specific, targeted help. We’re going to do our best to provide that. Look for speakers to cover more detailed aspects of SM – e.g. CRM connection, strategy building, ROI tracking, etc.
·         Having larger venues in which to congregate. Ideally, we’d never have events sell out – as it stands we’re 12 for 12. We want to have room for everyone who makes time to join us.
·         Continuing the SMC EDU efforts. We want to keep offering specialty training sessions on relevant SM topics, outside of each monthly “main event.”

How can you help?
Talk to us! Let us know how we’re doing, what you’d like to see, and how you might be able to help. Perhaps your workplace has large meeting rooms available we could use. Maybe you or someone you know is an expert in some aspect of the business of social media, and could be a speaker at an event or an educational session. Possibly your company would like to sponsor an event by covering the cost of appetizers and drinks. There are several ways you can communicate with us:  via our Twitter account, by making comments here on our blog, by engaging with our LinkedIn Group, by using the discussion area of the Facebook Fan Page …if none of these quite work, you can even email us directly.
We’re looking forward to another year of learning, growing and connecting with you!

Thanks again to our sponsors, Seattle.SocialCentral.Net, Spitfire and Gist, and the businesses who so generously donated the raffle prizes, including:  Hotel Max, Kodak, The Ultimate Ears Social Media Team, Cat’s Eye Design, PRWeb, True Fabrications, and Clear Awakening.

Sometimes people come through for you in a big way. This is one of those times. As a celebration of 12 consecutive oversold events, SMC Seattle wanted to do something meaningful for our anniversary event. So, we decided to help out a local non profit, the Jolkona Foundation. 100% of the ticket sales will go to fund one year of specialized science, technology, engineering, and math training for kids (through a Jolkona project with Technology Access Foundation).

But that wasn’t enough. Local businesses began approaching us wanting to help out. They wanted to give some prizes out to the folks helping out Jolkona. This is why we’re adding on a raffle to the event. We’re hoping that those coming out to the event will be as generous as these sponsors:

• Seattle hotel Hotel Max stepped up to the plate and contributed a free night at its downtown boutique hotel.
• Kodak donated an HD video camera, the Kodak Zi8
• The Ultimate Ears Social Media Team wants you to rock out with two pairs of Ultimate Ears 700 headphones
• Cat’s Eye Design donated a three-hour WordPress consultation, including theme customization and implementation.
• If you’re marketing your business, a social media press release is a must. PRWeb is donating a free release.
• True Fabrications is contributing a Wine Lovers Party Pack, including wine glasses, corkscrews, aerators, wine charms, cheese knives and cocktail napkins.
• A one-hour massage from Seattle masseuse Clear Awakening.
• And of course, SMC Seattle is contributing three Golden Tickets, which entitles the winners free admission into SMC Seattle’s monthly events for a year.

Raffle tickets will be sold at the event for $5.00 each, so bring your cash! Again, thank you to all of the sponsors, and especially thank you to the Seattle community for supporting them and Jolkona.

Every one of you has played a big part in making 2009 a great year for SMC Seattle, and we want to see all of you at our anniversary event! So, we are happy to announce that, with the approval of Spitfire Grill to fill the entire place, we will now be selling tickets at the door for our January event. (150 of them!)

This also gives us a great opportunity to raise even more money for the Jolkona project with Technology Access Foundation.

Here are the details -

What: SMC’s One-Year Anniversary Celebration

Where: Spitfire Grill, downtown Seattle 2219 4th Avenue  Seattle, WA 98121

Date: Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Time: 6-9 p.m.

Cost:
$10 tickets includes 2 drinks and apps http://smcseattlejan.eventbrite.com/ – SOLD OUT!
$5 minimum donation tickets to be sold at the door (cash/check only – drinks and food not included)

100% of the ticket sales will go to fund one year of specialized science, technology, engineering, and math training for kids (through a Jolkona project with Technology Access Foundation).

For more information on the event, please see the original announcement here – http://smcseattle.com/jan2010/

Thanks to our sponsors, Seattle.SocialCentral.Net, Spitfire and Gist!

About Jolkona’s TAF Project and Technology Access Foundation:

Jolkona Foundation believes that small amounts of money can change the world. As a 501(c)3 organization, Jolkona addresses problems across the world by connecting people to innovative non-profits and showing one-to-one proof of where the donation money goes. SMC Seattle is supporting them through funding their TAF project.

TAF is a Seattle-area non-profit that prepares underserved children of color for success by providing a rigorous and relevant K-12 curriculum. Founded in Seattle in 1996, TAF provides opportunities for urban youth of color to gain necessary skills and education to successfully compete for professional careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).