[...] their community to understand their culture, behavior, and norms before joining. I’ve done other embarrassing things in public, and learned a lot from [...]

Last weekend I was doing a workshop for nonprofits that consisted of a lot of people who were very new to social media and were older – from the health care industry and some working with senior populations. I got a lot of skepticism — “Why would we ever want to use this stuff,” etc. My laptop was being used for the presentation and I forgot to turn off my skpe. In the middle of it, my 87 year old Dad calls me on skype video. His calls always start with him screaming into the mic “Beth, can you hear me? Can you see me?” I was mortified at first and then I asked him to tell everyone how old he was and why he uses skype and his thoughts about blogs. It worked out because of the context. Next time I have to remember to sign off of skype.

Something that didn’t happen to me, but which I saw with my own eyes:

My soccer coach wanted to show us some tactics from a DVD he brought.
As he put it in it was – such a cliché – porn.

So he excused himself and went back home to get the right DVD.

When he came back and put that other DVD in, it was…porn. Once again.
That was so incredibly stupid that it still makes me laugh when I think back to it

[...] hoping presenters, speakers and officials from my next two conferences read this … and that the ones from previously attended [...]