These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Jennifer Leggio
Role: Social Business Blogger
Company: ZDNet
Who paid it forward: Jeremiah Owyang
Side-note: Jennifer is the only person who was both asked to provide a recommendation and recommended by someone else for the project. This speaks highly to the impression she is making in the social media world.
Jennifer is a social business blogger with ZDNet. She writes about how companies use social media and enterprise 2.0 technologies. She has an affinity for privacy, reputation, and security issues as it pertains to social media. Jennifer has been a communications professional for more than 15 years and has led or supported interactive social networking efforts for industry conferences including SOURCE Boston, RSA Conference and Black Hat USA, and founded the Security Twits, a community for network security professionals. She also co-hosts the Quick’n’Dirty Social Media Podcast with Aaron Strout and is a founding member of Technically Women, a communal blog project.
How Jennifer got into blogging: Jennifer has always been a writer and is really interested in technology. She was a journalist for two different newspapers before she moved into a public relations role about ten years ago. She moved to the San Francisco area and started working for a boutique PR firm specializing in security clients. On the side, she used to co-own an underground Bay area ‘metal scene’ website for music fans where she had a community management role. After the website was sold, she did straight PR for awhile and currently works in the network security industry in a strategic communications role. Seeing a need to connect her fellow security industry colleagues a few years ago, she established a “Security Twits” list, and through doing this she got to know a lot of people. What they ended up with were hundreds of people on the list and more connections via Twitter being made amongst security industry professionals. ZDNet reached out to her to write because of her efforts with this, so she sort of ‘accidentally’ stumbled into blogging due to her curiosity.
What Jennifer hopes for social media in the future: What Jennifer would like to see is for social media to become more integrated. She says that she would like to see it stop getting talked about as this ‘shiny new thing’ that people have to get good at for business. She says, “Social media doesn’t have to be its own department – it should be a cross-functional collaborative effort. It should be a value-add offered to clients without charging for it. There are a lot of specialties – if you position yourself as a ‘specialist’ you’re doing a disservice if you’re only offering one slice of the pie. Social media is one slice, and not the whole pie.”
A few thoughts from Jennifer on being an influencer: There are lots of posts on how to be an influencer, get more followers, network better, and so forth. Jennifer asks, “Who are the people you see doing the best work at this?” She says that it’s the people who have their heads down doing the work and not making spectacles of themselves. Jennifer says, “Do your job and share your knowledge; it doesn’t matter if you help ten people or 10,000 people. Know that the people who are reading you read because they want to, not because they have to.”
Connect with Jennifer on:
- Blog (and ZDNet blog)
