Jason Schmitt

(appeared in the February 21, 2013 edition of The Huffington Post)

For the first time ever, the skill sets and resume building certifications that relate to the newest iteration of digital proficiencies are cheap, accessible, and increasingly credible. If your social media skills are behind the curve or if you are having trouble staying competitive in the job hunt — you have no one to blame but yourself.

“Social media marketing is the way forward for companies,” says Hazel Richardson, Director of Training at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Richardson’s company recites the mantra of nearly all social media management platforms: they are experiencing incredible growth both in the platform usage itself as well as training users to be effective in gathering social media generated content. Kirsten Bailey, Director of HootSuite University, unpacks one of the factors at play in the increasing emphasis on social media skills, and says, “Companies get it. They want to make sure the people they are hiring, to a certain degree, are very socially savvy and that they understand how to navigate the online network space in a professional capacity.” Both Bailey and Richardson steer the educational components of two of the largest and most prestigious social media management systems.

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(appeared in the January 10, 2013 edition of The Huffington Post)

“Everyone is out there pretending they know what is going on in social media. They are all liars,” says Eve Mayer, CEO of Social Media Delivered and recently recognized by CNN as one of eight women on Twitter who will inspire you. Mayer is leading my social media-directed college course and emphasizing that social media isn’t a small subsection of the job search: It could very well be the job search.

Social media has aided job searches for years, but the early users of the platform were forward thinkers — now it is on everyone’s radar. Milana Rabkin, ranked as one of the 30 under 30 LA Rising Stars and a Digital Media Agent for United Talent Agency was an early adopter using social media as a leveraging tool to open doors. Rabkin tells my college students of her experiences, and says, “When I was looking for one of my first LA jobs I used Facebook a lot. I knew the companies I thought I wanted to work with, who were Disney, MTV, Nickelodeon, ABC, and I would search on Facebook by company and see who was working there. I would blindly message them and ask them if they had a few minutes to get on the phone and tell me about what they did and help me pass my resume on. I was relentless about social media connections and that helped me land early jobs. “

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(appeared in the Dec. 29, 2012 edition of The Huffington Post/TEDWeekends)

“It’s not that machines are taking us over — they are helping us be more human,” says Amber Case in her iconic TEDTalk “We Are All Cyborgs Now.” With nearly 700,000 cumulative views, droves of people have tuned in to listen to Case’s positive digital evolution mantra. I am happy to drink from her technological Kool-Aid — and I regularly waive the pro digital flag without much prodding. My cognitive dissonance occurs when I fixate on a couple smartphone navigation blunders where I have ended up 30 minutes in the opposite direction of my destination. I know the latter says more about my own mental state rather than faulty programming. Regardless, in those moments, I have at some cognitive level, placed my neurological brain functions and logic second fiddle to my Android-based counterpart — and that creates an unusual sensation that has never before occurred on the homo sapien continuum.

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(appeared in the Dec. 18, 2012 edition of The Huffington Post)

Amanda Palmer is rewriting the script of business as usual for hosts of creatives in the newest iteration of connectedness. She has the artillery to deliver: 37,697 tweets have been shot off from her iPhone toward her army amassing 754,297 Twitter followers — with new recruits growing steady at 1,000 per day. Her firepower is wide reaching and blends music, art, life, femininity, sexuality, comradeship, and fuck-the-status-quo sentiments all into one tangled conversation that is widely appealing and blatantly truthful.

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(appeared in the Oct. 19, 2012 edition of The Huffington Post)

Being a long standing Detroiter, prior to my family’s deeply considered move to Vermont, I was widely accustomed to faceless, nameless food and meat of the lowest common denominator. I am now a new professor at Green Mountain College; a college which has recently accumulated a large stream of national publicity after a series of community forums collectively decided to begin the process of slaughtering a team of oxen, Bill and Lou, who have worked on the campus for many years.

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(appeared in the  May 3, 2012 edition of The Huffington Post)

The music that you make as an art form isn’t in trouble at all; it’s in great shape. It is the music industry and the music business that is in trouble. - Seth Godin

Internet music sensation Karmin floated into the room engulfed with a mod 1950s demeanor, suicide rolled hair, and an on-top-of-the-world aura. It seemed that at any second they might lose their composure and shout out, “we did it, we did it!” And that wouldn’t be far from the truth, as they have accumulated upward of 300 million Internet views on their own accord and, subsequently, found themselves fielding nearly every major label groveling to be their partner in crime. They are legitimate stars now and they are one of the many current trendsetters informing the Rethink Music conference held by Berklee College of Music and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on the chutes and ladders associated with the current music business.

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(appeared in the November 18, 2011 edition of the The Huffington Post)

Maybe Van Halen killed it. Axl Rose’s diva personality disorder certainly didn’t help. Or, to get 99 percent of the readers on my side, maybe it was Nickelback that threw in the towel. The culprit is hard to pinpoint but the damage is done. Rock music as a genre is significantly less poignant in 2011 than it was decades prior — and the real catalyst of the demise might relate more to capitalism and the digital revolution than the outrage any spandex outfit could instill.

Rocker Tom Morello and his acoustic guitar have done as much to spur this Fall’s social critique as anyone. Morello’s folksy twang, urging on the Occupy movement, is reminiscent of Dylan, and is eons away from his Marshall JCM 800 guitar tones of Rage Against the Machine. But he is tearing it up. His voice seems to ring louder without the amps — and maybe that is the point. As Morello says “mic check” to a group of around 1,000 Occupy protesters in NYC, they engage in a collective recitation of his sentences that takes on a Pledge of Allegiance sort of tenor. Regardless of the lack of amplification and the cold conditions, the NYC corridor rumbles with the united human voice; that message doesn’t run on 87 octane — it burns rocket fuel.

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(Appeared in the September 7, 2011 edition of The Huffington Post)

An avalanche may be starting here in Detroit, a big one. Quite possibly, billions of dollars may be shifting from record labels’ pockets into the artists’ hands. Mega stars and one-hit wonders all may have a shot at a piece of the lucrative pie. Welcome to the wonderful world of digital. If you are a musician who in fact gets a check, you can address your thank-you letter to Eminem.

The core idea that brought this game changer to fruition was spurred in the Motor City. Eminem’s bulldog lawyers, possessing the eagle eyes that they do, saw a discrepancy in 2006 as to how his digitally downloaded songs, and the associated payment structures, were being handled by Universal Music Group. They went toe to toe with Universal Music about the discrepancy. Our well-oiled legal system finally spit out the conclusive verdict about a month ago, after the case trickled all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The top court in the land let the lower court’s (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) ruling stand that entitled Eminem’s empire to a much larger piece of the digital download pie.

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(Appeared in the May 5, 2011 edition of The Huffington Post)

As the record industry started to dry up and die and the major labels were sort of crippled and starving — it was a land grab. It was, “I just fired a third of my staff, and I am going to offer you half the money I would have last year. But I am going to give you a shittier deal on records, plus I want a piece of touring, merchandising, and publishing for which I have no infrastructure, I don’t really know what I am doing, and I am probably just going to get in the way. But I deserve it because my business sucks.” — Matt Drouin, Manager of the band Metric

Music may be between a musician, her guitar, and her fans: but when you introduce licensing, streaming audio, online campaigns, social media, the Cloud and many artists gravitating toward becoming their own label, you may need a four-wheel drive to plow through the congestion of left brain thought required to take the music to the end user.

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(appeared in the March 22, 2011 edition of The Huffington Post

Detroit is one of those mother pools of true rock and roll. When you look at what came out of Detroit musically it may lead the listener to say what’s going on in Detroit? What was in the water? Why wasn’t it New York? Why wasn’t it LA?
— Henry Rollins (2010 interview with Jason Schmitt)

It is an unusual juxtaposition. I’ll give you that. But yes, I am in fact having the gumption to suggest the most modern of new tech startups, and iconic behemoths like Google and Microsoft, might want to peruse other creative ecosystems, like Detroit rock music — and to investigate these sites with the hope of better understanding their continued market relevance. If we can dissect how the creative process plays out more clearly for a region like Detroit, who has had more than its fair share of creative success, we are getting somewhere in an information age where creativity is seemingly the king pin commodity.

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(Appeared in the January 21, 2011 edition of The Huffington Post)

Dan Gilbert has figured a few things out for us. It is possible to be from Detroit and be successful. It is possible to create a workforce that is positive in this economic climate. It is possible to revitalize Detroit’s downtown. And it is possible to go against the dominant statistics of an industry. But it is not easy — it takes strategy and a philosophy that is understood by the full organization.

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(Appeared in the December 22, 2010 edition of The Huffington Post)

For the first time, Detroiters are starting to figure out what the hell is going on. We know our future is in a smaller, more nimble model of Detroit. We know our future isn’t exclusively guided by the Big Three. We know our 139 square miles of Detroit city proper commands more media attention than many countries. We know Woodward Avenue is being re-branded to WEBward Avenue, just in case anyone thought this region was holding onto our manufacturing nostalgia. We know GM and Chrysler are set to role out 2,000 high-tech engineering jobs the beginning of 2011. We know companies like New Jersey’s GalaxE Solutions find the Detroit infrastructure so appealing, they bring 500 more high-tech jobs into the city. We know Texas movie production houses are complaining they are losing talent to Detroit.

So if all the prior is true, why does my inferiority complex still exist for Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta?

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(Appeared in the October 18, 2010 edition of The Huffington Post)

I need to get this off my chest fast. I don’t have much time. At the moment I am teaching eight simultaneous classes in the Detroit area at two colleges. I need to keep moving at all times. Walk along side me — I can’t stop to talk to you. I am the brunt of the public education system. I am the go-to man. I bring in over $275,000 revenue for my two colleges in these next 16 weeks — $600,000 in the year. I turned down teaching four more classes at another university. The madness needs to end somewhere. I have so many names and assignments swirling around in my head it’s not even funny.

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(appeared in the June 29, 2010 edition of The Huffington Post)

Nearly my whole life has been spent in a fog. As far back as I can remember I felt fuzzy. From first grade all the way through my 30th birthday. It was hard to concentrate, I was always horrible at memorizing anything in school, and felt anxious and shaky a lot. I can’t tell you how many times I was told, “try harder.” Could that statement be any more vague to a young student? Maybe due to the prior, I was never a big fan of education.

As I was finishing my Ph.D. three years ago, I realized I was just accepting these fuzzy/anxiety filled traits as part of my life. But I did not have to. I finally became annoyed. I knew that these cloudy feelings were not derived exclusively in my head, regardless of the fact that I had visited over ten doctors to diagnose this problem throughout my life. And like clockwork, after listening to my symptoms and checking me out, the doctors, one by one, deemed me as: the most healthy person they had ever seen.

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(appeared in the June 23, 2010 edition of The Huffington Post)

I got my Droid Incredible.

So now I am a whole discombobulated mess.

Pervasive digital media at my finger tips changes the equation. I now have access to the full breadth of information on the planet at any time — at a speed which will keep my attention. Pushing my daughter on the swing set. Waiting in line. Or driving in my car. They are all competing with my urge to check on every pressing issue. Should I run my app to see how far I jogged this morning? Any new Twitter feed updates? Should I check the cameras on the freeway to see if traffic is flowing before committing to my driving directions? What the heck, I’ll run them all at the same time. There is a reason the Betty Ford Clinic exists: Addictions are a bitch to quit. Old smart phones were the free samples of drugs to draw you in. I am now on the real stuff.

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