My lunch with the interns

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in emc education | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Today I was invited to talk to the interns of EMC’s Education Services organization. They wanted to know how I started, and what it means to do social media for a job. So I told them all that good stuff.
Of course, I couldn’t resist asking these digital natives a few questions.

  • How many of you are on Twitter?
    Only one had an account, and he doesn’t use it.
  • How many of you are on Facebook?
    Everyone is on Facebook, but two of them are not friends with their mothers! And one of the two IS friends with his grandma! I thought that was mean 🙂
  • How many of the you would work at a company that had no social media presence?
    This was interesting – the interns who were accounting or finance majors would not work at a company that wasn’t doing social media. The engineering interns didn’t care. Guess which group is my audience? The engineers! I’m finding they are very much like the people already in the field…..this audience uses social media differently.
  • Do you think you are a customer of Facebook?
    All of them said yes. When I said …no, you are Facebook’s product. After this, they asked me questions.

They asked me:

  • I heard if you delete a picture from Facebook you can never really delete it. Is that true?
    yes, that is true. If you put something in digital format, you should always have an expectation that you wont be able to control who sees it, or what happens to it.
  • What would you look at on someone’s Facebook page if you were interviewing them?
    I wouldn’t look at Facebook, I’d Google you. If you are just out of college, I’m not going to look for much. Maybe a club or some activity. Since I’m technical, I’m looking for technical posts, or geeky posts. So if all you talk about is comics, I know you’ll at least be a good cultural fit. I can always quiz you about the tech stuff in an interview. And as long as there is nothing weird, I’m happy.
  • What if you Google yourself and see something you want to hide?
    I told my story, about how I blogged about my daughter’s disability on my name domain blog. When she Googled herself she was very mad at me. But she started her blog, and worked to push my posts lower in the searches.

I really enjoyed my lunch with the interns. I hope they didn’t see me as another old lady. At least they didn’t give me the same looks my kids normally give me.

I hope I gave them some good advice.

And I hope they all friend their mamas on Facebook. 🙂

4 Responses to My lunch with the interns

  1. brianna says:

    Hey! 😐

  2. gminks says:

    so what emotion were you going for there?

  3. brianna says:

    Pouty face. I used the line instead of a P because the serifs made it look like it was smiling. : P vs
    : | that face looks more worried or something in the smiley, not at all pouty. I have to remember that using a colon/semicolon at the front of emoticons now codes it to be a smiley most places. D:

  4. brianna says:

    and wouldn’t you know, the preiview was serif but the actual post is san-serif so you have no idea what I was talking about.

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