By: jackie.sauter

When I was in college four short months ago, almost everyone I knew had a Facebook or MySpace account. If you didn’t have one (I was in this camp for a little bit), you felt like you were out of the loop on so many issues. Little did I know that outside of the land of academia, this still holds true.

Last night, Warschawski, a Baltimore public relations firm, hosted a “Martini Marketing Event” at Luckie’s Tavern in Power Plant Live, where social networking guru Peter Shankman spoke about the current state and future of social media.

If you’re not familiar with Shankman’s work, he is the founder and CEO of The Geek Factory and a go-to guy on marketing issues for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

The lecture was pretty eye-opening as Shankman talked about how prevalent social media has become. At one point, Shankman said “social media is life.” He asked the  attendees to raise their hands if they had a Facebook account, and almost every hand went up.

Shankman touched upon how our lives are constantly being watched/monitored — from cameras on traffic lights to somebody writing about your appearance on their personal blog.

Shankman also previewed some devices that are in beta right now — one of which is a video recording cell phone that can recognize faces in a crowd and tag them as such on Facebook.

It’s clear that for most Baltimore businesses, you either jump on the new media bandwagon or get trampled by the competition.

RICHARD SIMON, Multimedia Reporter