I tried something a bit different for this particular Internet Week panel discussion.  Being that it hit a real feel temperature of 100 degrees in New York City today, I opted to hang out in a nice air conditioned space, and watch the first live streaming session of Beer Diplomacy, a weekly roundtable discussion about politics featuring tech favorites and social media personalities. Today’s special session included guests such as Jim Louderback of Revision 3, David Berkowitz of 360i, Josh Harris, and Peter Shankman.

The hour long show started off with a discussion on what was referred to as “Weiner-gate,” moved onto Peter Shankman’s recent blockbuster post about hiring social media “experts” (or rather, NOT hiring social media experts), to the United Nations recently declaring the internet a basic human right, and finishing with the topic of internet regulation by the government.  A pretty packed show with some amazing insight into the current climate of the internet and thoughts and rumination about the future.

This was much a fast flowing conversation amongst the five gentlemen  (speaking of that, a confident, intelligent, sarcastic woman would have really rounded out this panel), and there were plenty of soundbites but here were a few of the real gems:

On Weiner-Gate:

• The internet is all about transparency and you can transparently showcase your stupidity. – Jim Louderback
• Do we really want representatives who don’t know the difference between a D and an @?   He’s so clueless, these are not the kind of people we need running the gov’t in the 21^st century. – Jim Louderback
• Technology makes it a lot easier to demonstrate all the ridiculous things that we do. – David Berkowitz
• He’s not important enough to get hacked.  No amount of privacy settings are going to protect you against stupid. – Peter Shankman

On hiring social media “Experts:”

• It was a fun piece, I woke up the next day to like 400 death threats.  If you’re calling yourself an expert, you’re an idiot.  No CEO in the world believes that Cool Trumps Revenue.   – Peter Shankman
• We have about 60 people at our agency, and if I see anyone who has “guru or ninja” in their bio, it’s a huge turn off.   It’s the easiest way to get rid of a candidate off the bat. – David Berkowitz
• SEO needs to permeate the DNA of your organization.  Whether it be sales or marketing.  Everybody has to live and breathe SEO, but the same has to be said for Social.  You can’t just let these “experts” parachute into your organization.   – Jim Louderback

On the UN Declaring the Internet a Basic Human Right:

• Let’s get the guys from charity: water to talk about this.  I think there’s more important things than the internet as a basic human right. – Peter Shankman

On Internet Regulation:

• I think in time, we’ll self regulate commercially.  - Josh Harris
• This isn’t about privacy, it’s about fraud.  If as an industry we don’t self regulate, the FCC should come down on us. – Jim Louderback

Catch the next Beer Diplomacy on Monday, June 20th at 8:40pm.  Also find them on Twitter @BeerDiplomacy.

This post was written by Jenn Pedde, the community manager for the Master of Social Work program at USC, and the co-founder of the #cmgrchat on Twitter.