Hire a Veteran!

Sheppard AFB, Texas

Hello to my friends, colleaques, Twitter followers and blog readers.

That picture to the left is of me when I was a very young USAF service member (laughing at the hair, glasses or fashionable business suit is allowed-Gads). That’s an Autovon 490L Switching System.

There are more than 26 million veterans in the US. And, I am one of the 6 million women who served our country.  I served in the USAF in a technical capacity right after the Vietnam war had just ended (more stats here).  As you can see in the photo, I was the only female in my training class. I had to wear men’s cotton fatigues, shirts (and boots) which had to be starched each and every single day.  Check out the shine on those boots! After I graduated from tech school, I was shipped to England for a few years, where I was one woman out of about 90 men working at small communications switching site in England.  A great deal has changed since those early days.

But, I do believe the women of our time who served, learned early to work hard with the hope of contributing and making it in a tough environment.  Below are some statistics about our veterans.

• Dept of VA stats on veterans http://www.va.gov/vetdata/Quick_Facts.asp
• Stats on our women vets,http://feminism.eserver.org/workplace/women-in-the-military.txt
• Stats about Vietnam http://www.veteranshour.com/vietnam_war_statistics.htm

Over the course of my life, I have continued to expand and hone my career relative to communications in some form or another as the times have changed. And, I have adapted with the changing times.

Since signing up on Wordress, I’ve been providing a plethora of user generated content about social media and communication related topics for a couple of years now,  because I really want to help people.

With the economic downturn , this recession is a tough environment to find jobs, and doubly tough for  veterans as well.

I’d appreciate it if you’d consider hiring a veteran, as well as work with other small Veteran-owned businesses. We  really do know how to get the job done, and we are mission oriented.

I am willing to provide consulting, 1099 and sub-contract support. Heck, at this stage I will simply take a few good hours of solid work to advise other small businesses.

With a few hours of my time, I can be invaluable in helping with your outreach and social media strategy.

Letterman Tweets! What’s Your Twitter Strategy?

Admittedly, even as David Letterman began his very first Tweets live on TV (snicker), there appears to be a great deal of nonsense communications, noise and ad hoc chatter.  He says, “it’s pointless and infantile.” But Dave, remember this medium is a relatively “new medium” and just beginning to blossom into maturity.  You can, indeed talk to David Letterman about whether  “You Smell Veal And Peppers?” 

But, seriously what is your Twitter strategy? Does your organization, agency, firm have a Twitter strategy?

With more than 70 Million users on Twitter, it is definitely the “buzz” word of 2009.  Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA.  Started as a side project in March of 2006, Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging micro-blogging service that works over multiple networks and devices. Truly, mobilizing communications into“now” PR.

Indeed, Twitter appears to be THE sensational social network micro-blogging tool for entrepreneurs, job seekers, and companies. Twitter is being used as a research resource, a collaborative enterprise social medium, PR, communications and marketing tool, an audience measurement source, messaging utility, networking facilitator and broadcast system. In countries all around the world, people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens right now—from breaking world news to updates from friends.

There are plenty of ad hoc strategies for approaching how to make effective use of Twitter.  And, for some, it may seem like it’s getting more complex each day.  Here are some Twitter stats

Is your Twitter strategy via one person posting aimlessly with many Tweets all day? Or, are you posting only as reactive Tweets to others? Does your organization have many people with Twitter accounts post about each internal line of business? Are you considering many single Twitter accounts? Are you considering Twitter accounts by topic, for many topics? Or, is your approach really more seat of the pants’?

“The majority of practitioners … still prefer to ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ and use intuition rather than intellectual procedures to solve public relations problems.”  ~Managing Public Relations (1984), James Grunig and Todd Hunt

With the excitement over all the new capabilities, social media and near real-time communication. Initially, it may appear that your Twitter engagement success will need only three elements; enabling technologies, core applications and a shift in behavior.

You may hear or be part of….“We’ve got to get on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. And, as part of that immediacy, you may also hear that there is sense of urgency. Ok, so you signed up and have an account or multiple accounts. Once completed, you begin hearing water-cooler discussions, hallway whispers and planning sessions with may contain some of the following: Initially, to many people, Twitter may not make a lot of sense at first. How in the world can sending little 140 character messages to a bunch of people, many of whom you’ve never met, help us grow our business, build our brand or be effective outreach? What do we do now? How do we do this? Who’s going to do it? Who will maintain it? How many tweets can I/you/we/they manage? How many should we send out daily, hourly, weekly? Why are we doing this? How many topics can we/you/they manage? How many responses can you/they RT in response hourly, daily, weekly, monthly? Who should we RT on? What if we end up with 2,000, 4,000 or 10,000 followers in under a month? Are we strategically ready to respond to each and every single follower? Do we send canned micro-conversations? What if you/we get no followers? How will we handle disgruntled audiences? What if you/we only get “women” followers who spam our account with messages wanting/sending messages to follow you to their “picts” or other services? How will you handle this if it these as ReTweets to some of our topics? What if staff want to take part as individuals? Again, Why are we doing this? Do we need to tell everyone internally?

In, a nut shell, avoid trying to fit two or three divergent strategies into one Twitter account as a melting pot.

Some of old school PR methods may still be of significant value for our evolving new communication world. Case in point, the Edward Bernays paradigm outlined in his influential 1920s book, Crystallising Public Opinion and expanded in his classic 1955 PR text, The Engineering of Consent, on which most modern public relations thinking is based, is under challenge from new approaches which if continued without adequate research will speed up “PR’s descent into disrepute.”

As a result, I plead for the continued need for the “Engineering of PR as a result of well founded research upon which one should base their basic Twitter strategy.

Therefore, to answer the Twitter strategy question in part, I emphatically assert that your strategy should not be ad hoc, should not be many different things crammed into one channel, but based on a sound strategic MarCom 101 basic formula, wherein Marston provided the R.A.C.E. formula for public relations which identified four stages. (research, action, communication and evaluation). Cutlip and Center provided their own formula based on this which they expressed as fact-finding, planning, communication and evaluation. For the purpose of this discussion, we will only focus on the emphasis of doing your research first.  Research is more than just a one-off activity at the end of campaigns and programs, but an ever on-going integral process of communications.

Evaluate inputs, outputs and outcomes as part of a continuous, integrated communication process (R.A.C.E.) from the earliest stages of planning, then if need be…hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. Use a range of formal and informal communication research methods which will lead to your final evaluation being strategic and much more valuable to management when aligned with mission and objectives.

For a variety of specific high level Twitter strategies consider some of the following:

• Corporate Reputation Management
• Event Coverage
• Media Relations
• Advocacy
• Product, Service, Promotion, Sales
• Internal Communication
• Investor Relations
• Customer Relations
• Crisis Management

 With any of these strategies, you will then need to use three key steps for each: follow, create and engage.

Twitter Strategy Considerations: Do Your Research First.

Research & Identify: How do you want to use Twitter? What function will it serve in meeting your objectives, target audience, needs and goals?

Research and know who your target audience, competitors and stakeholders are and what they are saying on Twitter: There are more than 50 research, tracking and analytic tools available to help track your audience, trends, messaging and your performance on Twitter. Learn a bit more about the basics of Twitter Search here. Here are a few named directly, Twazzup, Twitteranalyzer, Tweettronics,Twittercounter, Tweettronics,Twitnest, Klout, SuiteSpot, SuiteSpot,Monitter Wefollow, Twittermap.tv, Twittermap.us.

Research Who to Strategically Follow: Avoid following hundreds of people or companies immediately as this tactic gives the impression you are spamming people with sales propaganda. Consider developing strategic partnership followers/stakeholder to help leverage your outreach efforts, working in concert with other top industry SME’s. Therefore Research Who to follow, and identify people and agencies in the industry, business, niche, or company inline with your overall goals and objectives. Perform your due diligence before following someone. Do not sign up for an auto-follow service

Research Keywords: Make a list of relevant and timely keywords to help you find the conversations you want to follow and Tweet about. See what others are doing/using. Consider comparing these Key words what you are already using on your Internet sites, cloud tags, meta tags, search engine SEO Strategically synch them all.

Research: Integrate Search/SEO/SEM: Input in your keywords, names, topics into the internal/external search engines to tap into the conversations you wish to follow and engage in.

Develop & Vary Your Strategic Messaging: For example, for every 15 “Tweets” you may want to write or respond to 10 external value based tweets and then post 5 are about your products, services, or events. Create your editorial “calendar” for a daily, weekly basis. But also beware who is Tweeting about your topics as well, as misinformation. You can research this with a variety of tools as well. Within your 7 value messages leave links to your resources, services, products

Strategically Plan to Use Tiny Urls: Use these valuable links to shrink the size of your URL links so they fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit. Since the launch of Tinyurl.com about 100 or similar sorts of URL shorteners have developed. As of Spring 2009, Bit.ly over took Tinyurl’s use on Twitter.

Strategically Plan to RT. “RT” stands for Re-Tweet. This is a form of recognition and the best strategy for networking. When you want to recognize someone’s Tweet content you simply place RT and then copy their Tweet. This provides your network with the valuable information and opens up a line of communication with that person, organization or topic of discussion. Consider this may require more real time communication planning scenarios. How will you handle this? @: This is another form of recognition. If you @person or company you can ask them a question as well as publicly recognize them for their writing, topic or discussion. This is engaging with your audience.

Research and Strategically Plan for Your #FollowFriday: (Consider Target Audience, Other Twitters, Other Lists, Other Topics, Other SMEs, Trending Up) Twitter Strategies: #Followfriday Recommendations: during your #Followfriday efforts use a combination of messages. Write a few #followfriday messages, then create a Mr.Tweet recommendation. Make sure you check the auto tweet option on your Mr.Tweet recommendation, so it shows up in your tweet stream. Mr. Tweet, the self proclaimed “Your Personal Networking Assistant”, recommendations. Much like the strategy behind Linkedin recommendations, Mr Tweet recommendations allow Twitterers the opportunity to strategically recommend their favorite Twitterers. The Twitter strategy in making use of favorites can be used in conjunction with your Mr.Tweet Twitter strategy. Mr.Tweet Recommendations: There are two methods to writing a recommendation on Mr. Tweet. You can use the Mr. Tweet internal search engine to find people you want to recommend or you can allow Mr.Tweet to suggest people you may wish to recommend.

Keep your ear to the ground continuously monitoring and evaluating the pulse. And, as Dave Letterman said, “someone go outside and see if the followers coming!”

Be sure to have fun!

Other Resources:

• A Twitter Guide:
• A UK Gov Twitter Policy
• Tweetdeck, Organize followers into specific categories (i.e. industry leaders, customers, etc.)
• A List of Social Marketing Examples: Thanks to Peter Kim
• Offshoot: Examples of Social Marketing by Channel Type: Ray Schiel’s Blog
• An External Wacovia Brand Twitter Case Study

Follow @Unlimitedpr  Twitter                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Now PR & Social Commerce

What insights can we possibly draw from with the deluge of communication intelligence available with respect to the use of social media and social commerce?  We are seeing a new stage, yet again, in the evolution of communication, wherein social media is intersecting with the advent of the new social paradigm.  Determining how to aggregate and make the most of the social context from personal profiles, social media sites is worthy of discussion.

I propose to fellow PR professionals and academia that there is a need to fill the gap between our traditional media, journalism and public communication training and practices with an opportunity to strategically plan for the concept of Nowism or NOW PR.  The real key here is the sustainability of the strategic integrated communications across multiple mediums.

But, how will PR professionals strategically move PR forward in this new era of Now Communications?

What is the real value of real-time communications?

If you are still putting out a single print press release in newspapers, doing little to no content updates on your Website, placing a single print advertisement in a local real estate booklet targeting potential home owners or in a poultry magazine for local chicken farmers, then ask yourself if is this still your best most effective strategic communication medium for results?

Recently, Forrester published a report, “The Future of the Social Web” where they sketched a timeline of the development of the Social Web, dividing its evolution into five eras. And, according to that report, the first era of the development of the Social Web started to explode the social relationships among users. 

In the social functionality phase, social relationships resulted in a greater social functionality where several websites started to add social functionalities to help users interact with their peers and to make use of new applications and tools within the context of their own personal social networks.

We are now in the next era/phase, that of Social Colonization, whereby technology platforms like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect have standardized social functionalities among websites and a majority of websites now include many social functionalities.   More specifically, in  January 2009, Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by global monthly active users, followed by MySpace (see more on Facebook statistics).

If not right now, then very soon these  globally grouped identities, profiles and networks will allow PR professionals, organizations, agencies, businesses and people  to usher in the next era as a result of the interplay between Social Media, Data Mining and Electronic Commerce.

The challenge will be…is… to figure out how to theoretically adjust to these near real-time communication developments as it pertains to PR and public affairs professionals, social commerce and social technologists.  How will communication planning fit within the changing dynamic of our Social Context at any given minute and right NOW.  

Hence, there is a need for beginning a dialog on the future of strategic communication planning, now. What is the value of communication relative to the time between publication, consumption and influence? Just having a blog, a Facebook account, or Twitter profile does not make a social media strategy.  I see blogs and tweets, but no comments, no real engagement.  And, understanding the value of  continuous content doesn’t stop there. There are two other factors:

• Relevance to the target audience/consumer
• Ability to take action/engage (therefore possibly adopting new behaviors)

The Internet provides users the opportunity to merge information as a result of social communications, social networks, financial data, healthcare information, insurance data, usernames and passwords, PINs, accounts, networks, emails and more.  Linear measurement is dead. 

As we look towards the future, the PR profession will undoubtedly change as we have known it and now know it.  Our collective thoughts on where and how to strategically plan for near continuous communications is multi dimensional and will largely depend on how well PR firms/media, MarCom and public affairs professionals will be able to successfully adapt and plan for and apply new information management and communication models which will be derived from near continuous aggregated Data Mining tools as a result of the many Social Networks.

The potential of the Internet, social media and social commerce is the ability to consolidate and manipulate information with new applications of real-time data aggregation with the ability to ultimately take or enact more  immediate action. But, you have to stand above the ground swell and take a look at all the chatter.

The reason being that a person or target audience’s ability to take any action used to take years, months, weeks, then it was moderated with at least a 24 hour lag time…  now there is nearly no lag time.  New communication models will require immediate analysis and immediate communication. The new models of analysis will be a result of some of the following concepts:

• Novel aggregate media, social communication, social commerce algorithms
• Mining semi-structured disparate, fragmented communication mediums and data
• Classification and ranking of disparate, fragmented communication mediums and data
• Social clustering and analysis
• Aggregated media clustering and media analysis
• Aggregated SMS text Mining and analysis

• Privacy preserved data modeling
• Statistical methods of social media context
• Aggregated internal, parallel and external distributed data mining
• Interactive online media mining
• Contextual multimedia mining (audio/video)
• Aggregated Website, link mining
• Aggregated Real-time Graphical Mining

PR professionals will be required to formulate how to make use of new information management for advanced strategic communication planning and tactical approaches as a result of the evolving Nowism of communication from social networks and social commerce. Are you ready?

Are you considering tbe Nowism of communications and planning for it? “The boundaries” of what the web is  or has to offer has become much more blurred.  It is very deep. It does go beyond Google’s link popularity ranking.   Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else?   Now the web, in a sense, is just everything, all the time.

In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can’t talk about how big the internet is.  What is the circulation of total readers? Or, AQH? Because what is the metric? Social commerce isn’t like traditional media or “Web 1.0”. You don’t pay for eyeballs, average quarter hour listeners or clicks.

Possible future PR, media and communication applications providing a sort of “Visual Digital Sky” of aggregated communications might include: 

• Aggregated Real-time Social Commerce statistics
• Aggregated Social Media Context
• Aggregated Real-time Blog Communication Trends/ Context
• Aggregated Community Trends
• Aggregated User Content Recommenders
• Real-time Communication Trends Discovery
• Real-time Blogs/Social Networks Community Dynamics
• Aggregated Near Real-time User Reviews Ranking on Brands, Products & Services
• Blogs/Social Networks Summations
• Real-time Abuse/Fraud Detection
• Immediate or near real-time User Profile Modelling
• Near Real-time Event Detection & Tracking of Social Media communications (see Twittermap.tv or Twittermap.us & aggregate it)
• As a result, instantaneous Online communications/Advertising/News ( see Topix.com)
• Aggregated Information Retrieval
• Aggregated Sentiment Analysis
• Aggregated Language Processing of Global Communications
• Aggregated Semantic Tagging/Cloud SEO/SEM

• Aggregated Social Networking Search (see 123people.com)
  • Aggregated social network analysis with near real-time graphical analysis of complex global communications

We are seeing some of the above mentioned already, for example:

1) Consider Omgili. Omgili is the best way to find out what people are saying about anything and everything. Omgili is a way to find “subjective information”. As opposed to traditional search engines, which search for sites and pages, Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Let’s say you want to see the buzz now about healthcare now. Omgili also allows on to create chatter graphs such as the one I added to my website for demonstration purposes.

2) MicroBlogging Relevance and Influence aggregators like Twitalyzer to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on dozens of useful measures of success in social media, and the top real-time influencers on Twitter.

2) Individual reverse social media tracking such as 123people.com

3) Reverse Image Mining like TinEye:  http://www.tineye.com/faq#what

4) Twittermap.us or Twittermap.tv allows you see the aggregated live buzz on the street anywhere in the US or World and all twitter accounts from in a zoomed in locality

Audiences demographics, social context for a social commerce is near real time.

Are you prepared for Now PR?

If you would like strategic advisement or help please contact me via email at alicemfisher58@yahoo.com