(PR.co.nz) Social media is playing a bigger part in peoples lives, and todays children are growing up in ‘generation www’. It’s no surprise that parents are finding themselves out of their depth when it comes to their kids and social media and the use of the internet.
Social media specialists Adam Crouchley and Quentin Weber run seminars around the North Island, training businesses about social media. Recently there have been more and more stories in the news about bullying, trolls and suicide, all through social media. They’ve researched these issues and found one of the major contributing factors is the lack of education available for parents. Schools are teaching road safety, water safety and stranger danger, but they teach nothing about online safety. Adam and Quentin have come up with something to help.
Normally, Adam and Quentin run seminars to help businesses market and brand through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Recently they’ve had more and more requests to teach parents about how social media works and how they can best keep their kids safe online. They’ve put together a specialist seminar to give parents some tools and ideas around keeping their children safe. They talk about the importance of mobile internet, platform privacy settings, permanency of content that kids post online and much more.
Gone are the days where a household has a family computer in the living room, now most people have a personal computer right in their pocket, in the form of a mobile phone. Todays youth can access their social media right from their cellphone. They can access it from school or in the privacy of their bedroom.
Privacy settings are also something that are often overlooked. Every 6-9 months most of the social media platforms have a layout change, which normally means a change in privacy settings. Often these settings are left untouched, so the world can see everything that is being posted on these websites.
Information posted on the internet is there permanently. In the future we are going to see a lot more cases where employers or workmates are digging up dirt on someone through their social media history.
Social media is not all doom and gloom. Todays kids will be using social media as a core business tool in the future, so teaching them how to use it properly now is going to give them a great head start for their future career/s.
The seminars have been written for parents with some or no social media experience, but will include a bunch of tools for parents that use social media a lot. The seminars will be held in Rotorua, Tauranga, Hamilton and Taupo, starting on October 31st in Rotorua at the Millenium Hotel. For registration, see www.SocialMediaSeminars.co.nz
Media Release 18 October 2012.