Today I celebrate my 25th birthday and the first anniversary of this website, which neatly coincides with the 25th anniversary of dot-com domains. In the year since I started writing this blog, so much in my life has changed:

• Graduated from American University with a Master’s degree in Public Communication.
• Created social media strategy for a non-profit, and raised funds my favorite cause through tactics on Facebook.
• Managed Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for entrepreneurs, local bloggers, and established brands.
• Found an internship through Twitter, learned about research and professional writing, and was called a “social media power-user” by my colleagues.
• Television transitioned from analog to digital, but I still watch most of my video online.
• Online retailers of music, video and applications became the biggest, and opinion leaders curated our online content.
• Moved from DC to NYC, and started to build my professional network.
• Blogged about my passion for tasty beers.
• Started working with a leading web design, SEO, and online marketing company.
• Met many more Matt Hursts on the internet, built my personal brand, and became a professional.

If I haven’t been keeping up with the blog as much lately, it’s because I’m finally applying the insights I’ve written about here through my new work.  I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish working as a social media and online marketing pro, so expect to hear more about those experiences soon. Until then, thank you for sharing this journey from student to professional along with me.

Along with a team of classmates at American University, we set about creating a strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit organization serving underprivileged youth in the DC-metro community since founding in 2001.  One of the challenges unique to this client was their difficulty distinguishing not just from a successful parent organization, but also standing out from other non-profits in DC currently struggling for funds; branding would become a strategy.  Their hand-on education approach meant almost all of their funding was used in their programs, but was a challenge to developing new sources of fundraising. Meeting these budget limitations helped us build a strategy with specific objectives (met through some work on our own part).

As discussed in our presentation (and memo), creating and using a Blog and Twitter were critical tactics to meet the campaigns goals.  First these online tools serve an agenda-building relationship with the local newsmedia, through which Living Classrooms would try to earn media without expensive advertising. However social media is not synonymous with free media: even though these platforms are free to use, they require thoughtful and persistent work from dedicated professionals in order to work well.

Any organization can ask someone to Twitter for them, but only a professional can make it relevant to reporters, bloggers, and others who would want to tell Living Classroom’s story.  My role in this process was to build these media tools for them, and to start using these so that Living Classrooms would could model on them; unfortunately they did not have the budget to hire someone to write  so my model was key.  While new media levels the playing field, a public communications professional can lift an organization above from the rest, so that a non-profit like Living Classrooms can stand out online.

These tactics also play a critical role in winning and retaining new donors, since they allow Living Classrooms to provide regular updates which demonstrate the value of their donation.  Because Living Classrooms, like so many non-profits, is involved in so many programs donors don’t always know about all the work their donation allows an organization to accomplish everyday.  These regular updates demonstrate the compelling work Living Classrooms does through stories told in words, videos, and pictures in the channels which new donors are likely to discover this cause.  This serves as a compliment to the newsletter and mailer our group designed, usually adapting the same material for online use.

We’re still waiting to see which parts of our strategic plan will be used by Living Classrooms this year, so in the meantime please check out the blog I set up or follow @LCNCR on Twitter to learn more. For a communications professional with a strategic approach, online tools can become a successful tactic for non-profits to  overcome limitations and expand their communications budgets, ultimately changing minds and lives of those most in need of help.

By now you know the drill: broadcast television is switching from analog to digital signals. There are a few ways to keep receiving television of course: if you get cable or satellite nothing will change, but it you’re still using an antenna signal on an older television you’re going to need a DTV converter box. Fortunately you can get a U.S. Government issued coupon that covers most, if not all of the cost of these new set-top boxes before the transition on Friday June 12th, 2009.

While you probably know all about the Digital Televison transition, chances are you have family members or friends who still aren’t ready, even if they’ve already heard. So the Department of Commerce (partnering with the CEA) consulted with myself, as part of a group of American University students, to get the word out to young people so that we could help those we know prepare for the transition. Using a YouTube video contest, our objective was to strategically reach out to this audience so that they would be ready to help others get equipped in time before the transition. With our sights set on the original February 17th transition date, we were ready to use this contest to target these technology-connecting audiences.

Of course creating buzz with a YouTube contest takes more an announcement and a prize; although our partners had produced an original video and sent out press releases, the contest did not gain traction (or stand out from dozens of others competing on YouTube at any time). So my consulting group needed to do a little more: we created a social media presence for the contest on Facebook and used word-of-mouth marketing to engage potential entrants on YouTube.
We even wrote a script and shot a short video (watch above) mock-entry into the contest to show just how easy it could be to make a qualifying entry. These tactics helped to spur 12 contest entries, 5 videos of which were deemed finalists for the public to vote on the winning entry. More importantly the contest created discussions, both online and offline by contest participants and viewers, about the DTV transition within this target audience.

Ultimately it’s hard for any group to take credit among the myriad of messages supporting the switch, but I’d like to think our tactics contributed an outreach to a key public whose unique role might make the difference. Of course we’ll find out for sure on Friday June 12, 2009 just how many American’s television sets will be left in static.

Any one of these projects could warrant a blog post of it’s own, and I will be glad to share more about them after each is completed.  In a meantime, here’s a little insight into what a Graduate student in communications can accomplish.

• Practicum: My team has been building a long-term strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit that serves communities in the DC-metro area with hands-on environmental education and workforce development; they call it “Learning By Doing”.  This group does amazing work with young people who live in underprivileged areas, but one of the drawbacks of their success is having so many diverse programs it is difficult for newsmedia to make a clear focused story about what it is they do exactly.
  One solution I have contributed, which fits the group’s communication strategy, is by making a Blog and Twitter for them to get the word out. I’ll cue you in on how we plan to help a non-profit grow as donors face a recession soon.
• Management: We’ve been given a mock assignment in this class, responding to an RFP from the American Red Cross.  Our group has been designing a complete response, including plans for a multi-city festival and a localization model for more than 700 chapters of the Red Cross.  We’ll be competing with another group for the contract in an upcoming presentation, which I’ll try to share here.
• Social Marketing: Diabetes is not “Your Grandparent’s disease” any longer; it increasingly impacts younger people.  I’ve conducted an environmental scan of the issue, and conducted original primary research through in-depth interviews with students.  From there we’ve designed a comprehensive social marketing campaign, that doesn’t just change attitudes but people’s behaviors as well.  I’ve already built a mock-up of the online network presence, which is key to our strategy.
• Seminar/Capstone: My thesis involves original research of a scholarly nature, but with real-world application to the problem of energy conservation.  Although I am exploring an academic subject, exploring through case study and interviews how individuals are motivated to change their behaviors, I am writing it so that anyone can understand the issue.  Hopefully my research will help me build the soapbox I need to come out of my degree with specialization in opinion leaders, agenda setting, and marketing as they apply  to the salient public issues that brought me into PR.

I’ll be sure to tell you a little more about what I’ve learned… just as soon as I finish working through them of course.  Stay tuned.

• The Twitter Internship is soon to become simply An Internship.  Last week I was happy to join New Media Strategies as their intern, starting in May 2009. I’m looking forward to learning more about how they use new media tools, including Twitter where I got their attention to begin with, to participate in online communities where they promote and protect brands for their clients.  I think we’ll be a good fit together since we share the same inclination to try new online tools for ourselves so that we can understand any opportunities they offer for those we represent.
• I have signed up for summer semester at American University.  The two last classes of my Graduate degree in Public Communication will be Crisis and Political Communications.  And since they take place in the evening, it shouldn’t be any trouble for my internship.
• Rock the Vote, which I had previously applied for an internship, has begun to offer a fellowship program for young students like myself.  This largely self-defined fellowship encourages individual innovation using social media to reach young people and engage them in civics.  Although I probably will not be able to become part of their program because of my internship responsibilities, I hope to join their team and help out via Telecommuting over the course of their campaign.  Ask me or tweet Chris Kennedy for an invitation if you’re interested in joining the program.
• To date I was able to raise $195 from 7 donors for People to People on Facebook.  Although this did not reach my goal, it surpassed my expectations, and has raised the bar for non-profits like PTP online.  I am proud of what I could contribute using these social media tools as an individual, and look forward to helping them in the future.

While some of these updates might warrant a post of their own, thanks for letting me be a little self-indulgent.  If you’re dying to keep up on the latest as it happens, why not join me on Twitter already? After all, it did help me get this internship, etc…

@aCarvin and Katheryn Montgomery

“Are Media Making Us Dumber?” The question may sound like an oxymoron in an age where information is instantly accessible, but ubiquity of human knowledge does not always equal individual understanding. So how are media changing the way we learn and communicate important ideas?

I went to an American Forum last night to hear different perspectives on the issue and try to get a few answers.  Although consensus was difficult to reach in this panel discussion between academics and communications professionals, I think everyone agreed that people read a website differently than a book or newspaper article.

Without recapping the entire discussion (which is available online), one of the key themes of the night dealt with the ability to discern between the information which is valuable or junk. Unlike the process of reading a book, in which writers build support of its ideas gradually to create understanding, the internet does less to teach you to learn using reasoned arguments. At the very least, Google does nothing to discern between a scholarly paper and an anonymous ignorant individual – that is our responsibility.

Susan Jacoby advanced the idea that the internet is not an agnostic communications tool, but one McLuhan could successful identify like television as a tool designed to distract at every opportunity. And yet Andy Carvin was quick to distinguish distraction from an internet “designed for exploration and discovery,” appealing to our miserly nature as individuals to learn more about an idea.

Susan Jacoby

Even as civic engagement has become empowered through the internet, legitimate concerns about the internet becoming the primary or only source of information pose a challenge to those who want to introduce new ideas. Jacoby was wise to point out that the prevalent opinion was to treat Screen-time (ie Televison, Computer) as the reward for one’s work (ie reading and learning), as Professor Katheryn Montgomery described in her own household by watching the nightly news with her daughter.  Susan Jacoby’s argument that Books are necessary, not just for their information but to teach us the reward of taking on difficult challenges, was met by a seemingly hostile audience of students embracing-technology.  And while my own experiences may be more the exception than the rule, I see each medium as complementary if not mutually exclusive sources of communication; I still read books and investigative journalism as much as I read a blog.

One of the best discussions of the night came not from the panel but from AU Grad Student Joshua Berg, who introduced the idea that the internet enchances our ability to build knowledge through the use of hyperlinks.  He suggested that because a website allows you to link related articles where it would not be possible to gain these insights before it will create not just the ultimate fact-checking resource for journalists but the ability to deepen our understanding of ideas.
Indeed the panel added that Wikipedia is becoming more academically reliable as it builds more reliable peer-review processes (including citations), and that the future of annotated journalism is happening right now.  So that even while many worry about the loss of newspapers, Josh Hatch was quick to point out that,

“There is nothing about writing something down in a newspaper that makes that information any better than putting it on a website.  It’s just delivery mechanisms.”

Hopefully while the media for communicating ideas may be changing, perhaps the same values that apply to good journalism and academic knowledge will apply in these new media.

The American Forum is available online as an MP3 file. Also worthwhile: Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

In my search for a summer internship in DC, using Twitter has become indispensable for learning about the social media and PR firms I might apply to for work.  Not only does it help me understand those communications companies on the cutting edge, but the participatory nature of Twitter helped a company find me.  Before I knew it I had the inside-line on internships offered to me, even as no such positions are being publicly offered.

About 3 weeks ago I bookmarked the website for New Media Strategies, using a service which publicly shares my bookmarks through Twitter.  I was surprised when NMS, who must have been following public discussion of their company using Twitter (as they would for any of their clients), replied almost immediately to my update on Twitter directly.  I was impressed, and we started to follow each other on Twitter.

Almost a week later I had finished a short internship inquiry application, with the intent to discover any more job openings at NMS, but their website did not make it entirely clear where such applications might be sent.  So I sent another message on Twitter directed towards NMS, inquiring about where to send my application, which replied to me a name and email address of the right HR rep for social media.  Their employee was also polite enough to include their personal Twitter feed, giving me access to someone inside of their organization that could help keep track of my application.

After a few modifications to my resume and a new cover letter, I am happy to say my application has earned the attention of New Media Strategies.  I am definitely excited in learning more about this possible internship, although I am still seeking and applying for positions around DC.

To me the most revealing aspect of this whole development is how new communication tools, like Twitter, mirror the process of networking in real life.  While NMS took advantage of Twitter as a tool to monitor public opinion about their organization, it also gives individuals like myself powerful access to information that might otherwise have been achieved with a phone call or a fishing letter.

At the very least, the counselors at American University were impressed with the job offering I found outside of those being posted online.  Perhaps a little initiative and novelty in communication might help me stand out from the rest of the job market in my internship applications for this summer.