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!

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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

In advance of his talk at Gnomedex, he talked to Jennifer Cabala about influencing people online, networking for the non-people person and how he created #followfriday.

When did you first start using social media and why?
I’ve been involved with social media (BBSes and other forms of “interaction” media since the mid-80s (yes, I am old). I dove deep into blogging, twitter, etc in mid-2007. I had just sold my interactive agency, and was interested in exploring what was available online, and where social media had grown. It started with a blog (http://learntoduck.com) and quickly expanded into Facebook (I was on facebook from 2003ish, but never really did anything), Twitter, etc.

Which tools do you use most and why?
My comedic answer is always the same: my fingers. I have a strong belief that the tool is always secondary to the connection and relationships, and any reliance on tools just muddies that reality.
I spend most of my time with Twitter and Facebook. Trying to learn how to do video, so I am beginning to spend more time on Youtube.

How did you come up with the idea for #followfriday?
I had two friends, @jeffrey and @dannynewman, who decided to have a bet as to who could get to 1,000 followers the fastest. They kept asking me to tweet out that my followers should follow them, but when I finally did, they lost followers. I jokingly called myself the “anti-christ” of twitter.

During that time, I began to think about what it was like when I started using twitter. I followed a ton of people on the public timeline, and then began to follow a ton of people that they followed. Over time, I realized that the recommendations of people I trusted went a long way towards whether I followed someone or not. (I’ve always kept my following number low. I don’t want a lot of noise and I wanted it to be people that I liked to, and would communicate with often.)
So, I figured why not have a day, where people could recommend a couple of people to their followers that were worthy of a follow.
Who knew it would become what it is: more than 250,000 #followfriday tweets are sent every Friday.

What are some ways you can increase your influence online?
Well, you are just going to have to come to Gnomedex to find out!
I have always expressed influence as a combination of audience, trust and expertise. In essence, if you are trusted and considered an expert, you can exert influence. Audience or reach allows you to extend that influence in terms of audience size, and dissemination of message.

We have a lot of non-profit members, are their some techniques you could share about online fundraising?
Wow, that brings me back to the beginning of my career. Online fundraising really is not much different than offline. Its all about the right offer to the right person at the right time. I think most non-profits view online fundraising as a question of numbers (If I send more email, I will get back a better response). A better course of action is finding better ways to target messaging and the ask so it gets in front of the right people.
I am a big fan of DonorsChoose.org, and I think they do a great job of allowing the potential funders to self-select the right offer and the right time.

You’ve said that you aren’t much of a people person, but isn’t social networking about people?  How do you manage that?  Is there something different about the online experience?
Well, not sure I have the answers. My therapist and I have been trying to work that one out for the last 3 years! Social networking is about the people, but its in a safe environment. You can walk away at any time. Its relatively easy to manage.

Any tips for people who don’t like networking in person?
In terms of events, the only advice I have is come armed with a couple of stories. Ask people more questions. People love to talk about themselves or their projects. Keep moving. There is really something about spending a few moments with many people vs. a lot of time with a single person. Less likelihood of saying something dumb!

Anything else you want to share?
I’m excited to speak at Gnomedex. Its one of my favorite conferences, and Chris is one of my favorite people.

You can see Micah at Gnomedex starting August 20th.  Online, you can find him on his blog “Learn To Duck”, on twitter, or at work at Lijit.

SMC is excited to be a Gnomedex 9.0 partner and SMC members get a 10% discount!!

Here’s where you register: http://gnomedex.eventbrite.com/?discount=smcseattle10

An interview with Social Media Club (national) founder Chris Heuer, by SMC Seattle Board Member @jennifercabala. Chris talks about how he came up with the idea for Social Media Club and what his goals are for the next year. He also talks about resources for those just getting started and some of the tactics he uses.

In this interview with SMC’s Jennifer Cabala, Horvath describes how he manages to grow Invisiblepeople.tv and raise awareness about poverty using social media, by himself, with zero budget.   He also explains how fans can come from some very unexpected places, and his key to using social media successfully.

When did you first start using social media and why?
In 2003, I accepted a job in Ohio and drove by myself from Los Angeles to Ohio. I said I would never drive cross-country ever again. I also said I would never twitter. Last year I was living in St. Louis, and I was interviewing for a job in Los Angeles. My prospective new boss twittered, and was twittering about the interview process, so of course, I looked, and looked, and looked! Yup, I started an account! I also drove to back Los Angeles!

Being a TV producer by trade, I started a twitter experiment. As I drove to Los Angeles, I told the story and used a few tricks to engage people. To my shock it worked. People started to email me, “where you going?” The light bulb started to glow and I saw the worth of twitter as a storytelling tool. Good marketing is simply telling a good story.

When I started Invisiblepeople.tv, I never ever said, “I’m going to use social media because….” I used twitter because – IT’S FREE! I’m your typical front page USA Today recession story. I’ve lost everything. Layoff, after layoff, after layoff, house lost to foreclosure. I did not, and still do not, have an operating budget. I use what I can afford and will give me real-time storytelling ability.

Which social media tools do you use?
I’m a twitter addict. @hardlynormal is my primary. I call @invisiblepeople “hardly normal light” if @hardlynormal is too whacked for you just follow @invisiblepeople.

Of course, the nature of social media demands I be where YOU are. I wish I could pick where I am. Unlike a normal brand who has a specific demographic to reach I am after everyone’s perceptions of homelessness and poverty. I said I would never be on Myspace. MySpace Impact Channel approached me so next thing you know I’m creating a profile. I like Vimeo over YouTube but ignoring Youtube would be dumb. I fought uploading the videos to the Facebook page as long as I could. Last thing I needed was more video upload time. But people want it their way, so if I am going to have any real affect I need to not do it my way! I’m everywhere I can be, which is not easy for a one man band!

Which social media tools are most effective for you and why?
Hard to measure for what I do.  One day, I looked at the stats and I was getting serious traffic from America’s Next Top Model forum. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to know models and homelessness don’t usually connect. I followed the link to this post – I don’t know how she connected with Invisiblepeople.tv. But I can tell you this is exactly why I do what I do, and why I need to be everywhere!

I use twitter the most. It fits my storytelling style. When I am actually on the front lines of poverty doing my thing I have a bag of socks, a camera and iPhone all working hard while keeping an eye on my surroundings for safety. I still don’t know how I do what I do! So much all going down all at once in a very unpredictable and often volatile environment. Yes, I question my sanity often

Twitter is great at helping to engage new connections! The InvisiblePeople.tv Road Trip is almost 100% the result of connections made via twitter.

What social media lessons have you learned that you could share?
Tell a good story and the rest will take care of itself.
Be yourself – always!
No twitter drama! NONE! EVER!

If a non-profit or advocacy group came to you about the best way to get their message out there what would you recommend?
A complete marketing and media strategy. Social media without strategy is a toy, not a tool. I may differ with many opinions, but some brands may not benefit from social media, so they should not buy into the hype. It all depends on who you are, your story, your audience and desired result!

Mark will be presenting “A Conversation about Social Change through Social Media” at Gnomedex 9.0- Beginning July 15th, 2009, Mark is taking the show on the road using social media and bringing us along for the ride as he visits the homeless throughout the nation. Formerly homeless himself, Mark brings personal experience and compassion as he aims to bring understanding and knowledge to the growing homeless crisis. He will visit 25 cities across the nation including rural areas, larger cities, shelters and youth facilities.

SMC is excited to be a Gnomedex 9.0 partner and SMC members get a 10% discount!!

Here’s where you register: http://gnomedex.eventbrite.com/?discount=smcseattle10

When did you first start using social media and why?
I used to work at Digital City Philly (AOL) back in the day.   I loved chatrooms and congregating with folks who had similar interests and tastes…or lived in my area.   It was awesome and instant and powerful.   I love people.

Which social media tools do you use most and why?
Twitter is my lifeline.  Its my voicemail, its my email.  My mom knows when I land from a flight ok, my fiancee knows when I go to sleep at night, and now a bunch of great supportive folks know when I have chemo, feel like crap, or when we get a new donation for LIVESTRONG!  I don’t use a twitter client, I’m web all the way.  My brain just doesn’t wrap around apps.   I use tweetie on the iPhone though.

How did you come up with the idea for #blamedrewscancer?
I knew I had cancer before I was diagnosed.   I just had a sinking feeling.   So I started blaming random things on my cancer to cope and to ready myself to be able to hear “You have cancer” and to say “I have cancer”.   It helped.   Next step was to create a website to let others do the same thing.   Its an awareness thing, its an unwiring of a once taboo subject.   Taboo kills as much as cancer does.  There’s no place for it.  Openness and honesty and facing things head on wins.

What impact has #blamedrewscancer, and the people who respond to it had on you?
It’s the only reason why I can respond to this email without crying.    I have NEVER said or asked “Why” or “Why me?”  And I never will.   The people who support me and what our team is doing is the reason why.  The calls, the emails, the tweets.   It’s amazing.

What is the most surprising thing that’s come out of it?
People have told me that they went to the doctor to get lumps checked out because of how I found out about my Hodgkins Lymphoma.   That was surprising, and very powerful.   People understand that fear is dangerous.

What social media lessons have you learned that you could share?
Share.   Share often, share as much as you’re comfortable with.   Real connections come out of real communications.   If you’re fake, and you tweet or blog about stuff that is just to get your career further…you have lost.   And you will continue to lose until you’re real.

If a non-profit or advocacy group came to you about the best way to get their message out there what would you recommend?
Set yourself up everywhere you can be.   There’s no site that doesn’t have a group of people who are willing to support you or are interested in spreading the word.   It’s not about numbers.  It’s about people.   People are quality, numbers mean nothing.

Drew Olanoff will be presenting “My Cancer is Social” at Gnomedex 9.0. – He’ll discuss foundations usage of social media, tools, and platforms to spread the word TO PEOPLE about what they’re passionate about and what they’re doing. Widgets, Facebook Cause pages, and original ideas such as #BlameDrewsCancer utilizing the powerful Twitter platform.
You can find Drew at http://www.drewolanoff.com and http://www.blamedrewscancer.com or on Twitter or Facebook.

SMC is excited to be a Gnomedex 9.0 partner and SMC members get a 10% discount!!

Here’s where you register: http://gnomedex.eventbrite.com/?discount=smcseattle10

You can catch them at the conference or hit them up with your questions at the next SMC event!