Emceeing Mashable's Social Good Conference

I had the honor of working with Mashable (the top social media news site in the world) recently on their "Summer of Social Good" campaign. They basically created a charity fund and used social media to raise money throughout the summer for these four charities: Live Strong, The Humane Society, WWF and OXFAM. I helped lead one of the theme weeks, "Global Geek Week", which brought together the geek community to give back. We had people donating, tweeting #geeks4good and participating in our "how geeks are going to change the world" Youtube video competition. The winner won 2 virgin america plane tickets! I can't tell you what joy I get from bringing people from around the world together (on and offline), getting them excited and inspired to give back and bring positivity to their community.

From left: Next New Networks Michelle DeForest, Me and Mashable's very own Pete Cashmore

I very strongly believe that if you have a platform, then it is a responsibility to give back to something greater than yourself.

The campaign culminated last Friday, August 28th with the "Social Good Conference". I was asked to emcee and introduce the speakers- Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg, ThinkSocial's Toby Daniels, Model/activist Summer Rayne Oakes, The Case Foundation's Kari Dunn Saratovsky, Earth Hour's Andy Ridley, blogger extraordinaire of the non-profit space Beth Kanter, PR strategist Geoff Livingston, Scott Henderson and the amazing geek Drew Olanoff of blamedrewscancer.com-  leaders in their field whose work continues to demonstrate the power of using social media to engage, inform, activate the community and transform the philanthropic landscape.

Read Beth Kanter's wrap-up of the event here.

Causecast also used the event to release an all new Twestival video, which I also worked on for the upcoming Twestival Local. For all of you who have no idea what Twestival is, it's basically a Twitter-Festival- "a global series of events organized by volunteers around the world under short timescales, which bring people offline for a great cause."

Watch the video about the latest news and how local organizers can get more involved:

Twestival 2009 - Get Your Videos Here! from Causecast on Vimeo.

Once again, I want to thank all the speakers, Mashable and the community for their support.

Finally, I leave you with a quote that pushes me forward each day and will hopefully inspire you too!

"The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it." William James