The Digital Citizenship Summit launched in 2015 in West Hartford, Connecticut, with a follow-up event in the UK in January of this year. The 2016 U.S. summit will be held in San Francisco on October 28.

With summits in the pipeline for Australia and Ireland, the idea for digital responsibility across global and unique user groups and platforms is growing exponentially. And, it has an impact on broad topics such as online safety, digital ethics in marketing, how we interact on social media, and media literacy—all of which has implications for brands and their digital strategy.

In this interview, David Ryan Polgar, co-founder of the summit shares his thioughts about the implications digital citizenship has for marketing managers and the brands they promote. Polgar is a TEDx speaker and respected tech commentator whose keynote, Humanizing Your Brand (in partnership with digital ad agency IMRE), has been presented to top ad execs.

His ideas concerning digital citizenship, creativity, and humanizing the online experience have been featured in The Boston Globe, BBC, The Financial Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, US News & World Report, Forbes, and CNN.com.

CMO Tech News: Where did the idea come from to establish this Summit?

Polgar: The idea for the Digital Citizenship Summit came about when my co-founder (Dr. Marialice Curran) and I were discussing the absence of a conference dedicated solely to digital citizenship. There are a number of great gatherings around online safety, but none that embraced the much-broader concept of digital citizenship. We both saw a large need to bust silos and bring together all of the stakeholders involved in social media and tech—parents, educators, students, brands, industry, and organizations.

An idea, of course, will only get you so far. Luckily, Marialice and I both have a pretty large and diverse network that we can call on for collaboration. Without any seed money, we were able to put together the inaugural Digital Citizenship Summit in West Hartford, Connecticut for 220 speakers and attendees who came in from around the country. The day was filled with a high level of enthusiasm and we became the top-trending event (#digcitsummit) in the United States.

A huge opportunity that we have found is that there is a tremendously large portion of the population talking about digital citizenship issues but not currently congregating around the digital citizenship flagpole… We see our job as broadening the appeal of digital citizenship [and] our role to a large extent as curator and ringleader for these different groups in an effort to foster a culture of positive digital citizenship.

CMO Tech News: What does a 'culture of positive digital citizenship' look like to you and what does this mean for marketing managers and the brands they promote?

Polgar: There is an extremely important distinction between a culture of positive digital citizenship and being overly vanilla. This is very similar to the line brand managers constantly walk with being fun and edgy without being offensive. For marketing managers, a common digital citizenship challenge occurs when dealing with user-generated content. Many brands have struggled with this as they have capitalized on the frictionless nature of social media to grab and utilize social media photos without asking for permission.

CMO Tech News: What standards for ethics would you like to see brands and individuals adopt right away?

Polgar: Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. For brands, it is extremely easy and tempting to utilize photos without permission, exploit user data, and blur the line between unbiased content and promotional content.

For example, consumers are often ill-equipped to understand the convoluted legal language in a Terms of Service. While a company may not have a legal obligation to put the terms in simplified language, there may be an ethical obligation to be more transparent.

CMO Tech News: Your mission encompasses more than just online safety, but also media literacy. What should marketing managers be thinking about in terms of their audience and media literacy?

Polgar: Social media has removed the traditional media gatekeeper that helped audiences sort fact from fiction, and unbiased material from sponsored content. Social media contains a significant amount of gray area as to what is unbiased and what is paid or promotional.

For example, brands often work with celebrities and influencers. If media literacy is defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages,” social media users are often at a disadvantage in their ability to distinguish between unbiased opinion and paid opinion. Marketing managers should be sure to give some indication as to what, for example, is a paid tweet and what is purely the unbiased opinion of a celebrity.

CMO Tech News: How can brands get involved in Digital Citizenship and what is their obligation to the community-at-large?

Polgar: At the Digital Citizenship Summit, we define digital citizenship as the safe, savvy, and ethical use of social media and tech. While the media often pays the most attention to social media and teens, digital citizenship applies to kids, teens, and adults.

I like to say that ‘we are the Web,’ and that the online experience is only as good as we make it. Brands are a stakeholder is creating the Web that we want: one that is vibrant and welcoming.

Learn More

• Summit 2016 (attend in person or virtually from your home or office)
• History and Vision of the Summit