Newhouse Speaks: David Almacy

Earlier this semester our PRL 215 class had the pleasure of speaking with David Almacy who is the founder of CapitalGig LLC. He has over 20 years of experience in the intersection of public relations, digital media, government and public affairs. He previously served under George W. Bush where he was the White House Internet director, the first of its kind. He served as an official spokesman and directed online strategy. It was a fascinating conversation touching on the power of social media and especially today, how political campaigns use social media and the good and the bad that comes with it. The part of the conversation that stuck out to me the most was when he talked about his "bucket" theory. It's a theory about our individual social media presence and how to keep personal posts in one "bucket" while keeping our professional posts in a separate "bucket." He mentioned a story about a young woman who was interviewing for a job at David's consulting firm and right before he was about to hire her, he told his staff to look at her social media channels just to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary. Well, it turns out that a few days before her interview she was trying to go shopping in D.C. The D.C. Metro was all backed up due to a funeral precession for a fallen solider. She ended up taking her frustration to social media where she said something along the lines of "I wanted to go shopping but there's so much traffic just for one solider." It was completely tone deaf and very disrespectful and when staffers for David saw this, they alerted him and he ended up not hiring her. When he brought her back in to inform her of his decision, he explained to her that they were on the fringe of hiring her but her social media post prevented them from doing so. She lost that opportunity because of a pointless tweet that wasn't needed to be sent. 

    

    That story still sticks with me as to why it's so important to keep your personal and professional lives separated. Sometimes people post things on social media without batting an eye and that can end up coming back to bit you later on because you never know who will see your social media posts so you have to be extra careful. David also mentions how we should keep our personal circles separated. Don't combine personal and professional content because it never ends well. David also mentioned how powerful social media is as a tool. He told a story when he was on a family vacation in Paris and he saw the Notre Dame Cathedral catch fire. He snapped a few pictures and posted them to his personal twitter account which had a few thousand followers and when he checked back a little later it had over a million engagements and thousands of likes and retweets. This was his first "viral" tweet and he said it proved to him how powerful social media can be. He only has a few thousand followers and yet his post reached millions within hours. Overall, our conversation with David was fantastic and I learned a lot about how to properly behave on social media.